'The World Called Him a Thug'

Barbara Gföllner

doi:10.47060/jaaas.v2i1.23

Abstract

Widespread police violence, often targeted at black people, has increasingly entered public debates in recent years. Inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement, various African American young adult novelists have addressed the topic of police brutality and offer counternarratives to the stories about black victims disseminated in the media. This article illustrates how prevalent debates of Black Lives Matter are reflected in contemporary young adult fiction. To this end, the first part elucidates substantial issues that have led to the precarious position of African Americans today and to the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement. Drawing on theoretical concepts such as Judith Butler’s notion of "precarious lives" and Frantz Fanon’s description of the black experience in a white-dominated world, I will analyze Angie Thomas's novel The Hate U Give in view of ongoing debates about racial inequality. As I will show, the novel features striking similarities to real-world incidents of police brutality while simultaneously drawing attention to the manifold ways in which society disregards black lives and continues to subject African Americans to racial injustice.

Highlights

Widespread police violence, often targeted at black people, has increasingly entered public debates in recent years
Inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement, various African American young adult novelists have addressed the topic of police brutality and offer counternarratives to the stories about black victims disseminated in the media
The first part elucidates substantial issues that have led to the precarious position of African Americans today and to the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement

Summary

Monitoring the Black Body

From the days of slavery to the present, the movements and images of black bodies have been controlled and defined by a racial regime that preserves white supremacy. To explain the systematic over-imprisonment of African Americans, she refers to the criminal justice system as a “racial caste system” in the sense that it “denote[s] a stigmatized racial group locked into an inferior position by law and custom.” In her description, mass incarceration “refers to the criminal justice system and to the larger web of laws, rules, policies, and customs that control those labeled criminals both in and out of prison.”[12] This systemic oppression is key to what Alexander labels “The New Jim Crow,” a term which allows her to establish a lineage to the racist laws that defined the lives of black people in the Southern states after the abolition of slavery. A study conducted by Rutgers University shows that police killings account for 1.6 percent of all deaths of black men aged 20 to 24.20

The Thuggification of Blackness

Findings

The Dehumanization of Black Life