An Analysis of Language: Black Lives Matters and Parkland

Starr Carter, the main character in the novel The Hate U Give, and students who attended Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School both looked on helplessly as their peers lost their lives in a tragic and brutal manner. Born out of this trauma was a desire from the two sets of students to create and bring to the public two separate social movements. These movements have reiterated just how effective youth can be as protesters when they are passionate about their cause. While these two stories of activism are both involving the youth, that is largely where the similarities end. In analyzing how these students both became activists and the means by which they went about their activism, the obvious source of contrast is race. The racial makeup of both protest groups did not just inform the notion of their activism: it directly affected the language the two groups would use in order to accomplish their end goals. In order for their protest movements to be effective, they needed to be tactically different in how their languages would be used to more properly convey their messages. Race did not just become a major factor in the specific speech used by the protestors, it also affected the dialogue surrounding the two separate tragedies. While the Parkland Students had general public sympathy following the shooting, for Starr Carter and Black Lives Matter protesters there is an effort to simply make the public realize that a murder occurred and to simply feel empathy for a victim. This cruel and unsympathetic dialogue that Starr faces deeply disturbs her throughout the novel.

In The Hate U Give, a young black girl named Starr Carter has her life altered forever after she witnesses her friend Khalil murdered by a white police officer directly in front of her. These killing sparks a community uproar as many in her neighborhood take to the streets to protest for justice. For Starr, the key witness in the murder, this social movement pushes her into the spotlight, as many leaders in the black community, are calling for her not just to testify, but also to her story into the mainstream media in order to gain more public support for the offending officers conviction. The black community leaders add a further weight upon Starr as they make clear the fact that without her testimony the officer will most likely face no charges. However, there is a great deal of hesitation to move her story into the public as she faces the threat of danger from people who seek to silence her.  In comparison with the Parkland students, it can be noted that simply the choice to become an activist has a degree of white privilege attributed to it. For the students in Parkland, they were quick to come out regarding their strong opinion on gun violence and displayed no hesitations taking their fight to the highest stages, appearing on CNN town halls along with scheduling large scale protests within their community. This quick response and the eagerness to throw themselves into the public spotlight, while extremely beneficial for their cause, was a privilege Starr could simply not afford. Due to the nature of both her race and economic status, Starr felt she had to have a little more consideration before choosing to go public with her activism. Her fear of racial violence, and the worry that her protest would simply be belittled or not taken seriously by the public, is a barrier that the Parkland students never had to encounter. This fear is demonstrated by how the two sets of students used their faces as activist symbols. During the time of the March of Our Lives Protest, students such as David Hogg became national public figures and their activism received large scale praise by the general public. Their status as public figures became even more apparent when the Parkland students were on the cover of TIME Magazine, receiving recognition for their activism and efforts. For Starr Carter on the other hand, when eventually she does do a public interview, she has the cameraman and the network block her face out and change her voice. These two different levels of comfort are inherently based on race; if people knew that she was an activist and if her identity was to be made public, she was worried that she would cause her public life to be ruined as she would face constant backlash in the white private school she attended. This worrying about a negative reaction from her community is another aspect that makes Starr so different from that of her white counterparts in Parkland.

There was also a stark difference between the two sets of activists as seen in their actual protest language. The Parkland Students employed a large range of freedom in their dialogue that Starr could not. The students of Montgomery Douglas High school were especially bold in terms of their word choice, using curse words in order to more properly convey the degree of their sadness and anger toward the situation. This freedom was one that the students were only able to employ as a benefit in being white. In the Hate You Give Starr Carter talks largely about her word choice and the manner in which she says things to a white audience. She notes that because of the perception of her race, if she were to use explicit language her white peers would most likely dismiss her as nothing more than “hood.”  This anxiety about having their opinions dismissed solely because of a mistake in phrasing is one that white activists would not even consider, let alone have it be the initial block in becoming an activist.

When Starr eventually does make the courageous step to bring her experience into the public, she is faced with a harsher degree of criticism than she had expected. Even with Starr taking all of these precautions in her dialogue in order to protect not just her integrity but the integrity of her cause, the media's coverage surrounding Khalil’s death was vastly different from the discussion of the Parkland victims. For Starr, the frustration came from the media's distinct lack of sympathy. When she first does an interview on television, she is not asked questions about the events of the shooting but is instead subject to off-color comments based on a distorted view of Khalil’s character. She is asked questions that have a very clear intent: to paint Khalil as criminal in order to effectively justify his murder. The interviewer often in the interview asked questions that had nothing to do with the case whatsoever. What makes the interview even more shocking is that some of the questions asked toward Starr had nothing to do with Khalil at all and were instead questions targeted at Starr’s community. Questions about the gang and drug situation are not just based on an attempt to paint Khalil as deserving of his brutal death, but also carry the end goal of looking to invalidate the activism of Starr. In painting Starr and her community’s activism in this poor light, mainstream media is seeking to dehumanize not just Khalil but anyone who looks to seek justice for his death. This treatment of a deceased victim, and the effort to simply convince the media and the general public to care about the death of a young boy is what truly separates the Parkland movement from that of any Black Lives Matter effort. While the Parkland students had to convince the public of the need for increased gun control and regulation, they never had to take on the task of convincing major news outlets simply that the death of a teenager was not justified. This task puts the two movements at different starting points overall. For one the task was not just to push for legislative reform and accountability but to convince others that the victims themselves did not deserve their fate.

The manner in which the media and news outlets discussed the murders in this situation is also centered around a racial difference. When discussing the officer who killed Khalil, the media strays away from certain aggressive or fighting words. The words used to describe the death of Khalil are words such as “incident” or “shooting.” This word choice does not just seem to make light of the tragedy of Khalil's death, but also seeks to distort the truth of the situation. By using words that do not hold the perpetrator accountable for the shooting, the action is seen as simply a random tragedy and that Khalil's death was the fault of a specific individual. Obviously, this is untrue as Khalil’s death was done in cold blood by someone intentionally committing a murder. This treatment toward the officer exhibits a completely different outlook than that for the Parkland Shooting. For the shooter in Parkland, who took the lives of majority white students there was no sympathy from the mainstream media. This represents yet another difference in how the dialogue surrounding the two sets of students was so different on the basis of race. The Black Lives Matter movement has to contend with a problem regarding dialogue in addressing their message, while the Parkland activists did not.