Abstract
The fight for Black lives is waged in seconds; that’s the lesson of the young-adult-novel-turned-feature-film The Hate U Give, hailed for its empowering narrative of one Black girl speaking out for justice. Reading critical reception of the film and novel against the official film trailer, I argue that the trailer’s tracking of hands displaces speech (prosopopoeia) with “the cut” (ellipsis) as the dominant trope of a Black political agency that depends on being able to read for, not speak about, the form hate takes. The trailer offers vigilance as an akairic (akaireomai) temporal pedagogy for Black audiences who can no longer see the mountaintop and White audiences who might momentarily experience a life lived in seconds. Unfortunately, the trailer’s disrupted marriage plot renarrates the loss of Black lives as a matter of (one) Black (woman’s) guilt; the tragedy we are meant to mourn is the loss of a love, not the taking of a life.
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