My name is Jason Myers, and I’m a first-year PhD student in the English program at The City University of New York studying Rhetorical Theory and Composition. I have been teaching composition, research writing, and various versions of Introduction to Literature across three different universities in New Jersey for the last seven years now. My pages on this site will be dedicated to considering how the YA novel The Hate You Give by Angie Thomas might be incorporated into a second semester FYC course on literature with a research component, which is a very common course at colleges and universities across the nation. 

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Go to BIo Page

The Hate You Give by Angie Thomas is about a young woman named Starr who has watched two of her friends die in front of her by the age of sixteen. The first was the result of a stray bullet during a gang-related drive-by in the urban neighborhood of Garden Heights, where Starr lives. The second took place in the same neighborhood but was at the hands of a police officer, who guns down Starr’s friend Khalil with no provocation or cause. 

The latter event sets the book’s plot in motion, as Starr must grapple with her friend’s death, a criminal justice system that does not convict ​murderers who are both white and policemen, a news media bent on portraying her friend as a criminal, and a friend’s death that complicates her ability to negotiate between her dual personas:  Garden Heights Starr and Williams (a predominantly white private school) Starr.  ​The novel unflinchingly confronts systemic racism and police brutality in the United States through the lens of a young Black woman struggling to make sense of it all and, through this process, find her own voice in the face of an oppressive state apparatus. In doing so, the novel pushes back against the mainstream media’s criminalization of Black youth as thugs and super-predators and presents a narrative of community and care in the depiction of a Black working-class neighborhood.  Thomas’ prose is clear and accessible, and the book’s content begs for further investigation into the politics of Black power, the current development of the Black Lives Matter Movement, and the cultural relevance of Hip Hop as a genre of music, a philosophical tradition, and an epistemology.
 
I have dedicated two pages to thinking about how students might engage with this novel in generative ways that work to foster the development of political consciousness and, hopefully, a desire to question the status quo and to develop meaningful relationships with the written work that they produce in the course. The first page provides some sample low-stakes activities and potential writing prompts; whereas, the second hosts a list of outside texts that might be incorporated into a unit on this novel with brief summaries of each piece. I hope that you find this work helpful, as well as persuasive, for teaching the novel The Hate U Give, and I greatly welcome any feedback and suggestions. I can be reached via my Bio page. 

Low-Stakes Activities and Writing Prompts

Additional Texts
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Rationale: 

To those educators out there that see no place for YA Literature in a college classroom, I provide the following points:

• Teaching YA does not constitute a “dumbing-down” of the curriculum. In my experience, I have found the opposite to be true. When students find assigned readings relatable, interesting, and accessible they are much more likely to perform to the best of their abilities. 

          Remember that alienation = stagnation when it comes to the educational experiences students might have 
          in a classroom and in relation to assigned coursework. YA Literature provides fun and engaging material 
          that is quite suitable for the teaching of literary analysis, close reading, research methodology, and
          academic argumentation, if you or your department position these types of scholarly praxis as curriculum
          expectations. For a look at the success that I’ve had with other YA fare in a classroom like the one I’m
          proposing here, check out the teaching note that I published in Radical Teacher…: 
​          “Young Adult Literature in the College Classroom: Teaching the Novel Feed."

• ​The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas is a really well-written and intelligent book that takes on a difficult issue that speaks directly to the lives of many of our students. In this regard, it opens doors to discussions and to writing/research projects centered on untangling and unpacking the political, social, and economic realities that allow racialized systemic violence to continue to persist in the United States. On top of this, the nuanced portrayal of its protagonist, the world Starr inhabits, and the supporting characters the novel employs allow for a variety of different questions/topics for further research to manifest as well as promotes the development of critical literacy.  The novel invites students to read with and against it, towards and away from it simultaneously, making it both an engaging read and a thought-provoking treatise at the same time. Thus, the text may be perfect for helping reluctant readers, as many of my students are, to appreciate literature while also introducing them to them to the ways of reading they will most likely be asked to perform in academic contexts throughout their collegiate careers.  

​With these two points in mind, I feel/hope that I’ve made a case for the adoption of this novel into the curriculum of the second semester FYC course on literature with a research component that you’ve been assigned to teach on your campus. And while I’m explicitly focused on this type of course on this page, I see no reason why the novel itself and/or some of the activities/prompts that I propose couldn’t be utilized in other literature/writing courses, as well. I’d be curious to hear what others have come up with re their teaching of this novel.