dear angie thomas

Dear Angie Thomas,

This book was staggeringly informative in a variety of ways - it brought to my attention how widespread police brutality against people of color is and the distrust that racial profiling by the police has built in the African-American community. It was also progressive in a variety of ways, because there is a scarcity of young adult books with protagonists of color, let alone young adult books that so adeptly discuss a social justice problem that many stay in denial of. You’ve beautifully taken on police killings and galvanized me, and other readers, to take action against an issue for which statistics fail to describe with your book.

However, a scene that particularly stood out to me was, of course, the point in the beginning of the book where Khalil was shot dead by a police officer in the presence of Starr. It made me think hard about how heartless you would have to be to murder someone for reasons that don’t justify their death simply because their racial background causes you to perceive them as a threat. As I researched more about police violence, I came across similarly heart-breaking stories and footage: parents being shot in front of their infant children, students being shot for trying to break up fights, and people who were shot but whose physical disabilities rendered them incapable of fighting back. What angered me more that was detailed in these accounts I read and this book was the immunity bestowed upon these officers, and the get-out-of-jail-free card that prevented perpetrators of hate crimes from being arrested because they as police officers are untouchable when it comes to the justice system.

Throughout the book, people suggested that Khalil had it coming and that Starr wasn’t telling the truth when she described what happened the night that he died. People twisted the story however it suited him - that Khalil had been a drug dealer, a thug, or a gang member. When I first read the book, I had reread Khalil’s death scene multiple times. A police officer made a split second decision to pull the trigger, ending a life, but people still believed that Starr, the childhood friend of the victim, would lie about the circumstances of his death after witnessing it. What stood out to me more is that the book also pointed out that Starr had lost another one of her childhood friends to the force when she was in grade school, and that fact made me think about how a person of color could so easily lose more than one person in her life to police violence. In Starr’s community, one in which police brutality was almost normalized, African-American parents trained their children to handle police encounters, something I’m sure no one can imagine white parents having to worry about their parents going through.

Khalil’s death scene, which I did cry through despite not being even 30 pages through the book, was written so simplistically, which is what I loved about it the most. Starr was overwhelmed in the moment and couldn’t have an emotional breakdown immediately - it was only when she woke up the next morning and realized that she had watched her childhood friend being killed that she was able to fully process the gruesome nature of police killings and how violence of that sort can so suddenly affect family and friends of the victim.

Thank you for writing such an impactful book. Thank you for furthering the discussion about police brutality in present-day America. Thank you for effortlessly portraying the aftermath of the loss of a teenager after he was shot with a gun by a member of the force our nation expects to protect us.

Sincerely,

Sneha