Jason Ke ENG2D1 Ms.Doak 11 Mar. 2022 Racism and Police Brutality As humanity progresses, we become more inclusive of those who are different from us, but there are still many communities around the world that hold heavy discrimination and if you add some police corruption on top of that, you end up with Starr’s life from "The HATE U Give" by Angie Thomas. Have you ever heard of racism? Or uncontrollable police violence? Have you ever witnessed racism? Or have you ever witnessed police violence? Have you seen or been verbally or physically attacked because of your identity? Whether it could be you dealing with racism or people around you, racism is everywhere, and it doesn’t get any better than that, especially in communities that experience …show more content…
He was shot by a racist cop who was trying to erase black people from their neighborhood. This didn’t make things any better for the cop, as later on in the story, the cop had to deal with the jury trial and much more. "One. Khalil’s body jerks. Blood splatters from his back. He holds on to the door to keep himself" (Thomas 15). This quote from the text demonstrates how Khalil was shot by the cop, mainly because the cop was prejudiced against black people. The cop was thinking exterminating black people from the community would get humanity closer to what he sees as the ideal society. This obviously didn’t happen and only caused more unnecessary conflict to occur. The cop was then brought to a jury trial and had to deal with many unnecessary events. In the end, he still "lost" because racism was somewhat diminished, which brought him farther from his "ideal" community. Another important death is Natasha’s death. It heavily enhances the topic of racism and police violence because when she was shot, she was a young black girl who was just playing in the water. In the text it states, "Natasha was splashing in the water, all happy and stuff." Then— Pow! Pow! Pow! ". (18) When Natasha was shot, she was 10 years old, the cop still proceeded to shoot without any hesitation, despite the fact she was a child. This demonstrates how serious the problem of police violence is and why we should be more concerned. No one should be able to shoot anyone without hesitation, especially a perfectly innocent child. The last thing is that in this novel, police corruption was debatably the greatest problem out of all the many problems; some people in the real world don’t believe in police violence, most aren’t even aware of the existence of police violence. Subsequently in the novel, Starr stated, "‘We want an immediate end to police brutality,’" I