At its core, The Hate U Give is a meditation on the toll of “code switching”—or moving between multiple social identities, depending on the context—for black girls in particular. By the time viewers encounter Starr, she has mastered the practice. For years, she has been showing up to school as a fraction of herself while also giving more than 100 percent to make up for the fact that she’s black, female, and from a working-class neighborhood. Typically, cinematic representations of code switching deal with external changes: one’s use of language, hairstyling and dress, comportment, and so forth. But The Hate U Give’s treatment of identity politics goes beyond the outward social performance to depict both the weight of bearing witness and the emotional toll of burying trauma. Crucially, the adaptation also argues for the importance of supporting girls who want to play an active role in the movement for black lives.

Code switching can sometimes be an act of survival. In Starr’s case, the first-ever emergence of her “version two” occurred after a devastating incident, a few years before the start of the film: She saw her other best friend, Natasha (Starr, Natasha, and Khalil called themselves the Hood Trio), get gunned down in front of her after a gang member opened fire on the block. The girls were only 10 years old. Viewers later learn that Starr not only witnessed the murder, but could also identify the tattooed shooter; yet she remained silent to protect herself. “I didn’t snitch,” Starr says with hints of both pride and shame in her voice when, years later, she finally tells her parents her secret. Immediately after Natasha’s murder, Starr’s parents send her to a private school in the white suburbs. Thus, for Starr, the horror of seeing her friend killed, the silence demanded by the law of the street, and her earliest acts of code switching in elementary school are intertwined.

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Like many other black girls, Starr learns to suppress her pain while still being present for everyone else she cares about. In The Hate U Give, Starr carried both the secret of knowing who killed Natasha and the shame of not being brave enough to tell someone. Oftentimes, even when girls do attempt to unburden themselves—whether telling their stories of witnessing murders or sexual assault, or even of everyday racist encounters—they quickly learn that the adults around them don’t always have the skills or resources to help. Research has shown that school-age black girls experience high rates of interpersonal assault, yet they receive insufficient support from institutions such as schools and the juvenile-justice system.

For her part, Starr attempts to repress the memories that torment her and instead invests in becoming the kind of person her friends and family need her to be. She’s the dutiful daughter for her parents, never letting her grades sag. For her white friends, she’s the nonthreatening girl who allows them to fantasize about being black—spitting slang and rapping the lyrics to the latest trap song—while carrying none of its burden. And she’s the “down,” loyal hood chick for her friend Kenya (played by Dominique Fishback) and the other kids she grew up with in Garden Heights.