‘The Hate U Give’ w/ Jonathan Peck

Full Transcript of Technicolor Theatre podcast: Season 2, Episode 3

In this episode of Technicolor Theatre, filmmaker Aditya Joshi chats with activist and actor Jonathan Peck about catalyzing activism, recent responses to police brutality, and the parallels of his protest experiences to the film adaptation of The Hate U Give (2018).

The episode aired on August 18, 2020 under the podcast’s previous name, Token Theatre, and can be found here. Full transcript (below) was captured by Madelyn Gee.

Aditya Joshi: Hello, and welcome to Token Theatre, a Mediaversity podcast about representation on film. My name is Aditya Joshi and joining me today, he has just come from sleeping outside New York City Hall, my friend: activist and actor Jonathan Peck. Hey JP, how are you doing?

Jonathan Peck: I am doing good, man. Thank you for having me today.

Aditya: Of course. You and I have been talking about you being on this podcast for a while, almost since its inception. Our movie choices have changed a few times. I think today we’ve settled on a pretty great option because it is a great movie that is also super timely. Today, we’re talking about The Hate U Give, the young adult adaptation from a few years ago starring Amandla Stenberg. It is a movie about a girl who watches her best friend get killed by police at a routine traffic stop and her journey to activism, self acceptance, and an understanding of what it means to be Black in a super white space. A deeper understanding of that. Did I miss anything there in the summary, JP?

Jonathan: That about touches a lot of it. How people of color, or Black people in general, have to navigate through the world knowing and understanding how police interact with them, view them and treat them.

Aditya: If you haven’t seen it, it’s on almost everyone’s “things you should watch” and “things you should read right now” lists. If you’re listening and you haven’t seen the movie, go watch it. Just like all the movies we do on this podcast, we’ll be diving into spoilers and deep into the themes of the movie. It will be very helpful to have watched it but even if you haven’t seen it, the things we’re going to be talking about today reflect the experience of every Black person in this country and to a lesser extent, every person of color. I think they’re really important topics to discuss. I’m glad I have JP on to talk about them. JP, before we dive too deep in the movie and the themes of The Hate U Give. Why don’t you tell our listeners a little bit about yourself and how you identify?

Jonathan: Great question. I grew up and was born in Queens. I was in Cambria Heights, New York City for the first decade of my life. Then I moved to Long Island, the very border of it in a town called Elmont and the town of Hempstead right across from the Belmont racetrack. It’s been a wild time. I look at myself as an African-American, which as of late has been something I’ve often questioned or have thought about whether or not that is my true place in this country. I know my parents both have very mixed backgrounds, but as a Jamaican Saint Lucian, many other things, and a long list of what is my nationality, those are the ones we primarily use in my household. Of course, on censuses, voting, and everything else in applications, the option that’s there is either Mixed, Other, or African-American. It’s always been a struggle in the American confines of what I would really associate myself as.

Aditya: That makes a ton of sense. I think there’s probably a whole other podcast worth of conversations to be had about the way that we group people of color and immigrants in this country. African-Americans who are actually Caribbean, but are ancestrally African. Then there are South Asians and Asians who are from Africa and white Latinos and all these things that we never take into account when we’re thinking about identity markers for people in our community. Let’s talk a little bit about The Hate U Give. This movie came out a few years ago and I think made a mark but has now kind of re-entered the public consciousness in a big way. It was made free for streaming on Juneteenth, which is actually how I watched it on demand. It’s a movie on everyone’s lips right now. What was it like the first time you saw it? I guess like before the second wave of the Black Lives Matter movement.

Jonathan: Yeah, it was in a shocking way not surprising. It was more or less a different day, but the same routine of what we’ve been experiencing all our lives in just another different faceted story and how the people who are in that world react to it. I think at this point, we’ve gotten to a point in our country where funny enough people are becoming desensitized to the idea of all these movies that show and demonstrate the African American struggle, dealing with police brutality, and the ways we have to navigate and control ourselves in being safe and what we say, dress, where we go. It’s completely been an experience for me, because no matter how many times you hear about it or a new movie is made, it still hits a deep, deep spot in my soul as a Caribbean American, where this is the life you live all the time. These are things we have to experience where I know me, as a Black individual who drives my own car, I have a brush. Not using that brush as a normalized habit in front of a police officer is reaching for something that could be suspicious. That’s something I got to think about three or four times over. Where I place my wallet because I can’t have it in my back pocket. There is no way in which any situation, we walk out of these without adhering to every whim and escaping those situations with our lives. It’s a scary thing to think about every time you watch a movie like this where once you start watching it, at some point in the movie, the altercation that’s coming is going to set you off in all the ways. It’s just a matter of who set it off, how they set it off and what’s going to happen afterwards.

Aditya: That’s actually a really interesting point. That last thing you said, where you’re always on edge. I mean, obviously, The Hate U Give, you know from the trailer that someone’s going to die. The thing that struck me after Starr’s friend Khalil dies, her brother Seven is another young Black man. Even though he goes to a private school and has all the markers that white America, and I guess generally not Black America, considers to be a model “Obama Black person.” I was worried the entire movie that either him or Mav, Starr’s dad, were going to be killed by the police or by the gangs or whatever. That’s a reflection both of the weariness that you spoke of, the knowingness of what this culture does to people who look like that, to young Black men. Also, this is maybe another conversation, but the way that we portray Black people on screen is mostly suffering and dealing with systemic racism that’s so visceral and violent, like police brutality. That totally registers and makes sense.

You know, usually I would ask you about what your view of representation was like before this movie, but I don’t really think that that’s the conversation we should be having right now. We can get right into it. Starr makes this transformation from someone who operates in primarily white spaces, keeps her head down and code switches — which is hard — to someone who by the end of the movie is taking on a very heavy activist role. You recently underwent a similar kind of political awakening. Can you talk to me a little bit about that and the parallels between Starr’s journey and your journey?

Jonathan: Yeah, absolutely. I think one thing to think about, in reference to that. It never really crossed my mind that in her journey, it kind of starts off the same exact way where once this incident takes place — the loss of a friend or the loss of a Black individual within your community or in your country — you kind of just navigate the way you know how. It’s just another day. You carry on quiet, keep to yourself, mourn amongst your people. The more you watch the way the media portrays the events that happen, how they happen and how it went down compared to your truth. The truth you know with being in that situation and breathing that situation, it becomes unacceptable.

It becomes a lie you refuse to live with that ignites that fire that you cannot let someone else tell false truths to tell a part of what happens to be your story in a way that seems to make everyone else watching feel comfortable in a normalized state in which these situations happen. I think that happens, when there are some things you can’t no longer bottle up. I think one of the really good things the movie did was put a microscope on the family and how they chose to navigate the world. How Mav taught his children at an early age how to address officers. He taught them their Black history. He taught them the ways in which if a situation occurs with an officer of the law, these are the ways in which you navigate them.

Another wonderful side is from their uncle Common, who is a police officer. He explains to them how an officer in those situations should be thinking or how it is assumed they are thinking when these situations arise. Those are not the things we’re seeing today. For me, I was always desensitized to the amount of Black death on Facebook and Instagram. Believing that in a state of helplessness, there’s nothing I can really do. It’s just another case in which you hear about it for a week and then you don’t hear anything about those cases again. Whether families get their reparations, and this time around, hoping that it is no longer intolerable and that the right course of actions happen. They don’t. When people come together as a group and no longer want to tolerate this kind of behavior, there’s much more at stake. It’s all Black life. Then realizing, you get this glass shattering eye opening ordeal in how those you’ve considered friends and family operate in these situations. You start to see people’s true colors and you start to realize how comfortable people have been in your pain.

This is not something I personally can just sit at home with. There are millions of people who have never protested in their life, I being one of them. I’m now in a position to say I have a voice. I can use my voice. I think especially as an artist who uses the stage or the camera to storytell, I give an cathartic experience to our audiences to feel and have an understanding of the world through a different set of eyes. This was a time more than ever to use my abilities and my talents as a Black individual and an artist to say I will tolerate this no more. Those who know me, who talked to me, who believe in me. Once they know that I’ve gotten up and I’m no longer tolerating it or tolerating the behavior of comfortability and white privilege no longer. That I can no longer be in silence because it was just what was accepted, that things are going to have to change one way or another. There is no going backwards from here.

I think that was the biggest thing for me. Never looking at myself as an activist but as a human being who will not tolerate civil injustices, systematic oppression, systematic racism. I just think that as well as what Starr was fighting for, that you reach a place where you can no longer sit with your grief and pain when no one else is suffering like you are, especially when nothing is being done to make these families feel any better.

Aditya: Something about Starr’s journey that I think is relevant today, to your point is she starts using her voice to get justice for her friend. Then when that justice is delayed, when there’s no indictment of the officer who killed him, that’s when she realizes that the normal mechanisms that we operate within which many activists these days are rightfully saying are mechanisms that only exist to control resistance, will never be the way in which to enact real widespread transformative change. It’s really interesting to hear your personal evolution there. You mentioned that you’re an actor, a writer, you studied philosophy in college. I think you have operated in a lot of pretty white spaces and put up with a lot on that front. To draw the parallels to art, as a writer, you write because you like to write but also because you want to perform and you want to be able to tell your stories. Nobody’s going to tell your stories for you. I think what Starr realizes and it sounds like you have come to agree with is that nobody’s going to fight for you either.

If you want real change to happen, it’s only going to be driven by people who need the change to happen, even if it’s going to require allies to get done. You also mentioned Carlos, Common’s character, and his portrayal as what a cop can be. But also, I think something really smart about the movie is that they have a Black cop who is empathetic and we like him. He’s like a good character. He clearly cares a lot about his community and about his family. But you see immediately he is disdained by the people in the Black community, where he no longer lives or feels safe to live. When he tries to explain to Starr his mentality, like you talked about it is so evident that even the best people in the wrong institutions can be corrupted by the way that we have built norms and those institutions.

Jonathan: It’s appalling and shocking to witness those kinds of things. In the past two weeks, I have witnessed for myself what that can look like. To be on the frontlines in the beginning, the very first weekend of protesting for George Floyd and for all Black lives, it’s apparent that these officers, if not corrupted, are not autonomous. They are not in a position to make choices for themselves. If they were, which is more horrifying, that if they were, that they choose to stand in a position where it becomes abundantly clear how horrific they truly are as an organization. All those around them who aren’t like that, who are watching and committing that bystander effect, are just as bad and as culpable as all the other officers committing those crimes. They’re not doing anything about it. They’re not holding their other officers accountable. We watch it time and time again in a situation where you can just look at an officer commit an act in which any clear person would say, “That’s not okay. Let’s take a step back and assess the situation.”

But it’s forward momentum. There is no stopping until it is silent. Until it is ended. This is every night. This is what we’re seeing. This is what we’re dealing with. This is what we have to go home with — Having the mental meltdowns and the post-traumatic sleepless nights. Having to deal with the bruises, the pain, the 12 to 18 hours over holding in jail cells with no water, no food, and being slapped with fines or all of the above in which they choose to exhaust and oppress. Until after a week and a half once they had to install a curfew, which still did not work the way they wanted it to, you can see how the organization changed. How they chose to handle themselves in a better light after all of their methods and how they chose to respond to these marches deteriorate.

Aditya: The interesting thing to me is something that we’re seeing now which I’ve never seen before I feel like, though it was always there under the surface, is performative activism from the police. Which is like a really interesting thing. I mean, we’re seeing people kneeling, cops kneeling, linking arms. It’s all in the same way, to link it back to The Hate U Give, it reminds me of the way that Starr’s white classmates use the protests as a way to further their own kind of whims. Cops are performing…and maybe they are allies, some of them, but they’re performing this allyship in order to save their own reputations, their own jobs and their own funding. Starr’s classmates are performing allyship to look woke, to get out of tests and to have something to talk about. I am curious what your thoughts are on the performative allyship of the movie and how that has compared to — I don’t know how much you’ve actually been able to be on social media given you’ve been out protesting almost every day for the last three weeks. But how do you think that reflects and if it does reflect with what we’re seeing right now in our society, among our friends, peers, the news, anything.

Jonathan: It’s crazy to say that they’re not so far apart. Especially in the beginning, where white allyship becomes this, “I’m suddenly awake now. I see the error in my ways, my family’s ways, and how I’ve been navigating so comfortably amongst my friends and co-workers in all of their hurt and pain.” To some extent, they have used and can use social media, as what we call echo chambering. This ability to say, “I feel like I’m doing something. I am addressing. I’m asking questions. I’m asking, ‘What can I do to my fellow Black friends, Black community members? How can I culture myself? How can I educate myself?’” They ask Black community members how they can educate themselves on their own country’s history of oppression and systematic racism, in which they have all been taught in. In which their white privilege grants them to navigate comfortably and not have to think about those things on a regular basis.

Then there are those who are truly for the cause. They understand that this is our time to give all melanated voices a place to be heard. A place to have a platform and no longer be silenced and feel seen. Something the majority of all Black people, especially in poor income housing, don’t have those opportunities. They have been forever silent and never had an outlet to speak on anything they may be going through, because no one wants to listen to them. Taking care of their family using drug money, having to loot and steal to provide their daughter’s next meal. Those are not situations we created for ourselves. We don’t do that for the sake of wanting to do that. Those are the situations that have been given to us. Within the confines of clawing our way to get into the right side of society, to fit in to get the degree, follow the system’s educational rules, find and get a career in which someone else controls how much money I get paid and what I can do with my money.

Aditya: There are a couple things in there that really struck me. One of them that I want to talk about a little bit first is the systemic endless cycle that comes with that thing you just said. We didn’t put ourselves in these positions. It’s not our fault that we end up at the schools with the least funding. It’s not our fault that you’ve put us in neighborhoods with houses that aren’t as nice and are old and falling apart. There’s systemic issues here. If you try to say “I don’t see color,” which is something that everyone’s heard a lot for many years and then KJ Apa’s character, Starr’s boyfriend, says that in the limo at prom and it’s like you’re ignoring all of those things. I think that Starr has a really good answer to that in the movie, which is “If you don’t see my Blackness, then you don’t see me.” Which is a line I really, really, really like. Then of course, he does a cheesy a** “I see you, I see you.” You’re like, “Do you?”

I think that’s really important. The conversation that reminds me of is a conversation on the couch that Mav has with his kids about the endless cycle of trapping and the system failing poor Black people. The lack of opportunities and the lack of infrastructure means that the only way to provide for a family, like Khalil, he has to start selling drugs because his grandma has cancer and they don’t have health care. There’s no opportunity for them to get health care. You just cycle people into this culture of trapping, which cycles them into a prison industrial complex that treats them as expendable and is like the New Jim Crow. It’s like a crazy thing to see articulated like that, because I don’t think it’s ever anything that you’re taught about growing up. I didn’t learn about redlining until I was in college. We learned about the Civil Rights Movement and MLK. We don’t learn that only 20% of people in the U.S. approved of MLK’s actions at the time of his death. We don’t learn about Black Panthers. We don’t learn about Huey Newton. We don’t learn about Marcus Garvey. We don’t learn about any of these people that are on the forefront of the revolution. We also don’t learn about why they were fighting for equality beyond like drinking fountains and slavery, which is crazy. I think that this movie does a really good job — which is shocking, considering it’s a YA novel — of articulating all of that stuff in a way that is clear without being preachy.

Jonathan: Yeah, it does a very great job in articulating the aspect of how to deal with it as a family, how they process the situation. It shows very much how there’s another way to fight the system and not be a part of the problem. Not giving the other side — white people, the government, the system — another reason to gun us down or to apprehend or detain us. As you said, you think about the fact that solely history is written by the victors. To say we may have handled this very poorly, this is the way we should have handled it. No, you don’t get the challenge or the state of mind. This is the information and you’re going to absorb it. This is your history. There’s nothing else you need to know that’s important. If you want any other information, you have to go out of your way to find it. Outside of family, outside of libraries, outside of school. It’s not part of our agendas or our curriculums. There’s so much we have to teach you that Black history, in and of itself, in our place and our history just clearly doesn’t fit within the confines of things you have to know.

Aditya: It’s crazy. I was watching a highlight on Twitter of this writer for Desus and Mero and I’m sure maybe you’ve seen this. She interviews white women basically. The interviews are hilarious, but one of the things that she asked is “Who are these five people?” It’s Malcolm X, MLK, but then Marcus Garvey, Huey Newton, and I can remember Louis Farrakhan, who are a couple of big names in the Black Liberation Movement and the Black Panthers. Alison Roman, who I’m not even sure why she’s famous. She writes cookbooks or something for the New York Times. She said something when she got rightfully roasted for on Twitter, but I was like, “Man, honestly, there’s not a low chance that if I was in the same spot, I would have said something similar.” It was like, “Who was Marcus Garvey?” Alison Roman was like, “I don’t know but there was a park named after him. There’s a street named after him in Harlem.” That is, I think, the extent to which a lot of people know, the revolutionaries of Black history, but more broadly minority history in this country.

I mean, how many founding fathers can any normal person name? Probably like 5 to 10. How many people can they name from the suffrage movement? Less than three? How many people can they name outside of MLK from the Civil Rights era? How many Native American chiefs can they name? There’s so many things that you’re just like, “Who are we thinking about? Who are we learning about in this country?” It so shapes how we think about who this country is for. If we’ve learned that the country was founded by Washington, Madison, Hamilton, Jefferson, and built by FDR, Rockefeller, and Carnegie. Then in the modern day shaped by Gates, Jobs, Bezos and tech. How are we going to think about who this country should be catering to and who this country was built for?

Jonathan: Our educational systems for the most part, you’re taught to not think for yourself. It shows today, where you have millions of individuals asking to learn more about history that should have be common knowledge,

Aditya: Right, like watch 13th.

Jonathan: It’s been out for almost five, six years now.

Aditya: It’s about the 13th Amendment, which is like 200 years old.

Jonathan: To now see things that Trump have said, to now see situations in which these conversations have already been had. It’s now shocking and opening your eyes to this world that was always there. The veil has just been lifted up in front of your very comfortable seats. You’re just like, “What is this? I can’t navigate the way I want to anymore. I can’t just go grab my Starbucks coffee the way I used to.” Then you put all of that in the midst of a pandemic in which people are confined in their homes, where now they have no choice but to digest nothing but information. Now is a better time than ever to just be like, “Well, I know my country better than ever, what the fuck is this?”

Aditya: You dialed in on something that I really want to hit on which is you used the word comfort and comfortable homes and comfortable lives. You didn’t say this but you know, comfortable ignorance. I think this is not just white people. This is people of color about other people of color. This is straight people and LGBTQ people. This is an erasure of the Black trans woman who started Pride. This is everything about our history and everything about the way our society is set up is catered to make the most powerful people comfortable. Which makes sense, if you think about it. Who runs the country? Rich white men. Who wants to be comfortable like rich white men? Why do we have increased police presence in minority neighborhoods to keep white people comfortable? Why did redlining start to make sure white people were comfortable in their housing prices? Why was segregation the thing for the comfort of white people?

Even now, Black activists are still even in their outrage and their righteous anger, doing things in such a way that it requires that they’re enabling white comfort because it’s a necessary evil to get anything done. You can make white people uncomfortable, but you have to do it by easing them in. It’s like, “I’m a Black person who knows my history and knows how hard it is to be Black in America, but you don’t. So here’s 10 books to read.” It shouldn’t be on Black activists and Black people generally. You shouldn’t be asking your Black friends like, “Hey, do you have any books about what it’s like to be you?” That’s not a thing that we should be forcing on people of color, but it is a thing that we’re doing and The Hate U Give talks about that too. It’s like Sabrina Carpenter’s character is the closest thing we get to like a real racist? She’s like, “What about the cop’s family? We have to worry about them too.” It’s just like, this white guy killed a Black kid, but we’re worried about his comfort and how his family is going to deal with it. Instead of worrying about what Starr says, “What about Khalil’s family?”

Jonathan: There is a sense of what we choose to direct. Our focus is to feel comfortable especially. I can’t speak to the white side of things, but I can say I’ve learned through going through all these protests the last few weeks that we as Black people have adopted white people’s comfort. We’ve been oppressed for so long, we shut ourselves up. We figured, what is it going to do but put us in a position to further be silenced. To further be in a position where we look like the thug. The hoodlum. We look like just another rap star, another athlete, anything that has already labeled us not as fit for society as they have been in doctors, nurses, lawyers. You think about the fact that this is what it’s come to where we have to have these conversations about how we’re going to navigate our conversations in the future. How we choose to talk about things and what we choose to be educated about. If I have to embarrass you by asking you three things about Black history that literally go over your head that should be common knowledge, then it only goes to show that how much of what you’ve been taught and what you chose to learn for yourself further proves the way this has all been set up. I mean, sure, we could talk about countless scenarios in which we’ve been set up for failure. Crack epidemic, Black Wall Street, Tulsa, Civil War, Selma. You can think about so many scenarios in which we’ve been deemed set up for complete and utter failure to be erased in the most passive way possible. The path of least resistance, where we cause the destruction amongst ourselves, that way there is no white person to look to.

You’ve been the monsters the whole time. Look at how you act, look at how you navigate our streets. The sad part is you can watch every person we’ve just named die at any time right now on your phone in a matter of seconds. You can watch any one of those individuals that die in cold blood. More than 90% of the officers in those situations have not been convicted in any capacity. Whatsoever has any full amount of justice been served for any of those Black individuals. It just hurts to even think about the idea that as you watch these as a Black individual, you actively look for where we did wrong in these videos. Where at what point did we act hostile? Did we resist arrest? Did we cause an official amount of suspicion to warrant a search and seizure? At what point do you just look at an individual and then you just take action?

Aditya: I mean, it goes back to the thing that Mav says at the beginning of the movie. The first conversation in the whole movie is like, “Do not give them a reason.” When it comes down to it, most of the time, they don’t have a reason to begin with. They’re just looking for a reason to weaponize your Blackness against you. Like you said earlier and like we see in the movie, the media is always going to say both sides. They’re always going to be like, “This guy got in-school suspension in high school for having his phone on him.” Stupid shit like that that you can’t even believe is part of the conversation. When the cops have 17 counts of violent complaints against them, they aren’t in the conversation. I don’t know how much more that has to be said about this stuff. You’re living it every day in it. I had this reaction when you showed up today, because I haven’t seen you in a couple months. And I always forget because since the first time we met you have started working out all the time and you’re super strong. I’ve forgotten that having not seen you for a while and I was like, “Man, JP is jacked,” and I was like, “Man, I wonder if that has made him an object for violence at these protests.” Because you’re a soft-spoken, artistic, fairly passive and quiet guy. When you’re on the street, nobody sees that because you’re a jacked Black dude who is wearing a baseball cap and in a mask. It was one of those moments where I just really viscerally felt the impact of having been living in this moment right now. I don’t think that that’s something, though I know it intuitively, that I would have really internalized and thought about when I first saw you for the first time in a while. Had we not been right in a moment that is forcing us all to have this heightened awareness about how people are treated.

Jonathan: You are no longer in a position to look away at any given point. Then you have to check yourself for it at all times. I think that’s really important to think about. I had the conversation with my dad the other day, where he’s like, “I can now walk into a store with a hoodie and a mask on. It’s not because I look like a criminal, but because there’s a pandemic going on and I can kind of feel okay about it. I can be like ‘Everybody’s doing it’ so I’m a little bit safer than I was yesterday.” It took me so aback at how right he was. In this day and age, as much as we as Black people have checked ourselves for years and being followed in stores and being overlooked and whether or not we can afford something based on how we’re dressed, whether or not we’re a threat based on how we dressed, whether or not we’re educated based on how we talk. You think about all these things that have placed us in all of these positions and how much of it is truly our fault.

What it does to us psychologically, what it does to our mental, how we have to go home and think about this kind of ugliness we have to deal with night in and night out. Whether or not we are in a position to be hostile about it or just swallow that pill and be like, “Well, it’s another day. It’s just another day of another situation in which I’m just the problem as a Black man or a Black woman or a Black member of the queer community.” No matter what you do or how you are, there is already a preconceived idea about you.

Aditya: That is stacked against you. I guess like that resilience, pushing through and accepting that it’s part of being Black in America thing. The line or the moment that really gets me in this film is when Starr is talking to Issa Rae’s lawyer character. She’s like, “I saw my other best friend killed when I was 10.” Throughout the whole movie, you know that she’s dead but you never really get how. Then you find out it’s a gang murder gone wrong or something like that. Basically, some guys shot her. Then she sees Khalil shot by police. She’s like 16 years old. She’s going to this school full of rich white kids honestly, like me growing up, whose biggest problem is that the parents won’t let them stay out past midnight. She’s seen two of her friends shot, her dad in jail and all of these things. It’s not because she deserves it. It’s not because those people deserved it necessarily. It’s because of the way that the deck is stacked. I think it’s a moment where everyone who’s not Black, and especially people who are white, are being forced, like you said, to reckon with what their identity and the way that they’re portrayed in the world means for how their life is lived and the benefits that they get.

People have always abstractly been like, “White privilege means that I am more likely to get a job because of my resume or my name on my resume. Just don’t name your kid Deshawn.” That’s how people have been thinking about it. It obviously goes so much deeper than that. I know that as people who have grown up brown and Black in this country. The other thing is that it’s really forced the South Asian community and the Asian community to reckon with the relative privilege that we face as opposed to Black people. How we’re elevated and used as weapons against the Black community. Because at the end of the day, our identities are all weaponized in some way. Black people have their identities weaponized to make them look like they’re “dangerous.” Asian people and Latinos also to an extent have this “devious striver, stealing our jobs, the immigrant alien” bias against them. Everyone’s identity is weaponized, but understanding how you subscribe to the perception that society has about other people is a super important thing that this movie talks about. Especially because of the context and code switching that Starr does every day at school and that this moment is forcing upon us.

Jonathan: Yeah, you brought up code switching. The idea that you have to be two separate people. You have to act two or multiple different ways, depending on the group of people you’re with to either be safe, be comfortable or be acknowledged. The idea that you live in a confined space for all of your life, because the fear of being exiled is literally at the forefront of your mind every day. Knowing that there are so many layers in which things have been ingrained in our bones that our very own people can’t come to love one another. The fact that the same way Black people have to have to come together for their own love is the same thing queer, trans, and the LGBTQ+ community have to do for themselves. They find love and survival within their own group, because that is the only group in which understands their pain, suffering, and nothing else. In this day and age of today in what’s going on, in trying to combine those two communities and finally beginning those steps forward in accepting all Black people for who they are.

Not an oppressive view they’ve given us of those who are outside of what they’ve deemed normal. That heteronormative state of loving another individual, to strip them of the idea that any one person can be anything they choose to be. They have every right as another human being to choose how they want it to be. To choose whether or not they have a child. All of those topics, those things in which there are laws written. To think about the fact that in this day and age, we are still considered three-fifths of man. Every 20 years or so that if you think about it, no matter the amount of years that takes place for that to be restated that we are hereby considered whole persons that have the right to vote. That those are written words that exist in our world that are a thing.

Aditya: It’s like because people forget. Just reminding them to be like, “Hey. Remember when we decided that we were actually people as well? Remember when before you decided we weren’t so we had to actually articulate it in legal documents?” The thing that really stuck out to me about what you just said, which I want to touch on a bit in context of the code switching and the performance is the idea that you are a different person at home, at school, at work. That is something that is unique to people of color. That is unique to queer people. Because if you are too gay at work, it may affect you. If you are too Indian, if you are too Black, if you are too Latino at school, people may think certain ways of you.

What this movie talks about, and I wonder if you feel this because I think as I get older I think about it more, I definitely internalize this. You start to lose track of which is the real thing. Starr has her neighborhood and home version of herself. She has her school version of herself. It’s clear, she’s more comfortable at home. But she spent so much time in school. People and her friends that she spends all her time with are at school. Her boyfriend is at the school. That version of herself is so present and performed, that at a certain point she starts to become that person. She has these two identities and it’s always a question of like, “At what point am I compromising myself? At what point has my performance become reality?” I wonder if you have felt that in your artistic spaces versus your home life versus your school life? Versus even people like me, friends of yours who aren’t Black?

Jonathan: Yeah, I think for me, absolutely. The idea that that’s been my entire life to the point that I started to believe code switching as a normal and okay thing to do. That I can at any time hang out with any set individual or group because I know how to change the way I think and act around this group to always be in a state of peace by not seeing certain things around them, by not acting the way I would at home or with my Black friends. It’s like, I have to put on, as you said, a performance to be different or to fit in. Because as much as I like this other group of friends, I know that’s not how they get down. They will feel slightly odd that they can’t say the things I say or they won’t accept me for saying those things as it is just being my unique thing. We live in a place where it’s just like, “Well, I cannot say those things. So now we all kind of just feel weird that this is something now.”

If I bring one Black friend to an artistic venture or social gathering where I start throwing the N-word around them, and I never throw the N-word around my other actor friends, then it’s just like, “Whoa Jon, what are you doing?” Then for the vice-versa effect for me to act spiritually open and be as inviting and vulnerable. Not as this hard individual who has to put up a front and talk shit 24/7. Both sides are seeing some facet of me, the real thing, and not understanding if it’s all me or I’m pretending with one group or the other or facing the fact that “Wow, there’s parts of Jon that he won’t even share with us.” Learning to turn that off or get rid of it has been a liberating thing. I can just be me at all times. From now on, there’s zero tolerance in how you choose to take that. Especially as an artist, it is kind of suffocating.

You want to be able to access all parts of you at all times. You want to be able to freely express and tell stories in the most vivid experience you can possible. Not placing restrictions on yourself for someone else’s comfortability or making sure that you are in the rights to maintain a relationship or connection or networking properly. It takes away your self identity. I constantly have to be in a position where you start thinking about things like when people say, “You speak so properly.” It’s one of those things that Black people always get where it’s just like, “How did you expect us?” Why is there that kind of questioning in the first place? Is there already that preconceived idea of how you’ve heard Black people before?

Aditya: You’ve seen Sorry To Bother You? It’s that performance, that code switching. I mean, it all feels so real. I think The Hate U Give does a good job of showing how young of an age it shows up and how it plays out in someone who is operating in a super white space but lives in a super Black space at home. We talked a lot about a lot of these things. Are there any other key scenes or characters or things in the movie that you want to touch on before we move on?

Jonathan: I think one of the most important ones is the one right at the end where her youngest brother pulls the gun on the drug dealer, his uncle who’s played by Anthony Mackie. You realize the shock and appall on everyone’s face in that moment in what’s really taking place. The world we’ve created for someone who shouldn’t even be consciously aware of such an ugly and untolerable thing that they wield a weapon of mass destruction capable of taking another life.

Aditya: The kid is like six. The thing about that moment is it is so shocking. The image of it burns in your brain immediately. It’s the kind of thing actually, that if I were writing the story, someone might tell me this seems too far-fetched. But the thing is, the movie does a really good job of tying it all back to the central theme of the plot, which is also in the title, which is that the hate you give affects everyone. The thing is, even though it seems in theory far-fetched, the reality is that little kids in this country find themselves with guns every day. 10-year-old kids are shot for playing with toy guns in the street. Even though it is a little child with a gun pointing at a drug dealer, as someone who lives in this country, this is definitely something that could and probably has happened. It goes back to this thing we talked about earlier, which is the cyclical systemic nature of how we restrict spaces and people of color are living in these small boxes because of the comfort of those in power. That scene is a lot to handle. Then it ends in a kind of happy ending, which maybe is not the most realistic. But it’s nice to see like an uplifting small story there.

Jonathan: There’s something in that where I think it’s good that that was the road they went down. You want there to be a semblance of…I don’t know if correctness is the word I want to use. The idea that we as a Black community can register how we’ve been set against ourselves.

Aditya: That the activism, finding your voice, and all of that can make a change. I think it’s the moral of the story. That kind of thing would be very hard pressed to happen in a non-movie setting. But it’s a young adult novel and it does it really well. The message that you don’t want to send is like, “No matter how much you speak, no matter how much you try, the system will always win and the people you love will always die.” Right? Even though that may be your reality sometimes. I think part of what makes this movie powerful is that it can show you that while also showing you that there’s power in family, hope, and raising your voice. It’s a great movie. I’m glad that you picked it for us to talk about.

Jonathan: One of the strongest takeaways in all of it is don’t forget the message. Don’t forget what we’re fighting for, what we’re doing this for, why we’re out here. It is not just to rag and tag and burn shit down. There is a larger theme here. That’s what’s happening outside right now. Every day. City Hall, Brooklyn, Manhattan, everywhere. Don’t forget the message of what we’re doing. The importance of this movement right now, not the moment but the movement of what’s happening right now. Don’t lose sight of that, because it’s easy to inside of all of the deaths and the brutality. The losses we take whether in court, in media, at home, with friends and family in silence. Don’t forget, amongst everything, what we’re ultimately fighting for. That’s the main message in that last scene when she’s screaming in the protest. What are we doing? What are we all doing here? We can all scream and shout at one another but what are we doing? That’s the main message you want to think about everyday moving forward in 2020. Amongst everything that’s happening is what are we doing? Don’t lose sight of that.

Aditya: Right. JP, last question that we ask every guest on this podcast. We’ve gotten a little bit from this, but you are a filmmaker, a writer, and you are an actor. How does a movie like The Hate U Give inspire and change the way that you think about your art going forward?

Jonathan: Movies like The Hate U Give forced me to take all the risks to take and tell the stories I should be telling. That I have to be telling that isn’t being told because producers don’t want it, because studios don’t want it. Knowing that if the story needs to be told, it can get told and it will get told. You don’t need any studio approval. You just know, like Jordan Peele has done time and time again with years of having written his own content, that there is a point in which you make your own work. You do your own work. When you work that hard, when you’re motivated and inspired and driven to do those things people believe and see that. They will willingly want to see you take those risks and do as much as they can. I think that’s one of the biggest takeaways is that movies like Get Out, The Hate U Give, Queen and Slim. All these movies that speak on police brutality and the condition of the Black community is that we can tell these stories. There’s always a place for them. The more that it’s told the more people can get a better understanding of our history.

Aditya: Yeah, that’s a great segue for a great movie and a great guy. JP, thanks so much for being here.

Jonathan: Thank you so much for having me. It’s a pleasure.

Aditya: You have been listening to Token Theatre, a podcast about representation on film. We are proud to be part of Mediaversity Reviews dot com, a website dedicated to film criticism that takes diversity into account. You can find us on the Mediaversity website as well as Spotify, Apple, Anchor, or wherever you get your podcast. Today’s guest was Jonathan Peck. You can find him on Instagram @impeckable_timing. Today’s movie was The Hate U Give, which was at the time of this recording free on many sites. My name is Aditya Joshi (@aditya.mov) on Instagram. Our producer is Amanda Llewellyn. Thank you so much for listening, and we’ll see you next week.

Mediaversity Reviews is a project that grades TV & films on gender, race, LGBTQ, disability, and more. Follow us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook to join the conversation!