The star of "The Hate U Give" says the novel was like "read my own newspaper": NPR

As Amandla Stenberg was preparing for her leading role in the film adaptation of Hate U Give, she devoured Angie Thomas' novel for young adults 2017. "Reading the book has become a strange and spiritual thing because I started to have the impression of reading my own newspaper," she says.

Like the protagonist Starr Carter, Stenberg grew up in a black neighborhood, but attended an extremely white school. "I had a very parallel experience," she says. Stenberg was 10 when she started attending a school in the city. she was one of four black girls in her class.

"I have become very familiar with the experience of being isolated in my ethnicity," says Stenberg. She struggled to "show all the way" or to be fully herself.

"I wanted to register in this space where the culture was really white and privileged and a kind of alternative," she says. "I have therefore learned to adapt to this environment to feel included."

In the film, Starr also learns to adapt to the code change. "It means you have to switch a switch in my brain" around her schoolmates, she says. But she is proud of her origin. Starr "likes his darkness," says Stenberg.

One night, Starr and his childhood friend Khalil are stopped by a white policeman who shoots Khalil when he takes his hairbrush for a gun.

Thomas told NPR that she was inspired to write Hate U Give after the shooting death of Oscar Grant – a young African-American man killed by a white traffic officer in Oakland on New Year's Day in 2009.

Grant was not armed when he was shot and Thomas was struck by media coverage centered on his criminal record rather than on the circumstances of his death. "More people were talking about what he had done in his past than the fact that he had lost his life unfairly," Thomas said.

Starr is the only witness to Khalil's murder. While she wants the police officer to face justice, she is afraid to express herself. Without saying too much, she has good reason to want to restrain herself.

But Starr's father does not accept his silence – he has raised his children so that they fight to be heard. He taught them the Black Panther's ten point agenda, including "the immediate end of police brutality and the killing of black people" – and working for justice "by all means necessary".

"So why are you going to shut up?" he asks Starr.

There have been special screenings of the film throughout the country before its official release. Students from public schools in the Washington, DC area had the opportunity to see the film at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History.

Tatiana Minor, 16, who attends Fauquier High School in Virginia, says the company is trying to "neglect" or "stage" issues of racial injustice. She thinks the film will help people to open their eyes to what she knows to be "real-life issues".

Devon Lewis, 16, a classmate from Minor, says he understands Starr's reluctance to express himself. "She wants to talk, but she can not because she does not have a voice yet," he says. Lewis adds that he loved the way the father in the story called his daughter "Starr" for "light". It's a detail that Stenberg also loves.

"What's so beautiful in black culture is that we give our kids the power to give their name," says Stenberg. "My name really means" power "in Zulu and Xhosa, something that my mother was very intentional in. I think we recognize that the world is difficult and that we give our children names that They can use as superpowers. "

This notion of what you "give to your children" is referenced in the title of the book and the film: Hate U Give. It comes from THUG LIFE: The Hate U from Tupac Shakur. Give all small children F ***** Everybody. As Amandla Stenberg says, the love you give is even more powerful.