Answer:
Explanation:
The novel’s protagonist, Starr is a sixteen-year-old black teenager who witnesses the shooting of her unarmed friend, Khalil. Starr lives in the primarily black, lower-class neighborhood of Garden Heights but attends Williamson Prep, a wealthy, predominantly white school in another town. Starr constantly feels pulled between two versions of herself—Williamson Starr and Garden Heights Starr—and changes her speech patterns out of fear that her classmates will think she is “ghetto.” Traumatized by Khalil’s death, Starr is initially reluctant to speak up about the shooting and doesn’t tell Maya and Hailey, her closest friends at school, about what she saw. The shooting also makes her reevaluate her relationship with Chris, her boyfriend from a white, wealthy family. Starr feels immense guilt for not being a part of Khalil’s life in the months before he died. She starts a Tumblr blog showing the world the side of him she knew, and, emboldened by her family and by activist April Oprah, eventually decides to give a television interview to tell the world what happened. Despite witnessing Khalil’s death, as well as and that of her friend Natasha at age ten, Starr tries her best to live a normal life; she loves basketball, sneakers, and The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, which she feels echoes her own experience as a student at Williamson. As the media peddles more narratives about Khalil being a thug, however, Starr becomes more engaged in the fight for racial justice, going so far as to climb on a police car and address the crowd at riots following the indictment verdict in Khalil’s case. In the end of the novel, she lists the names of many black individuals killed at the hands of police, and promises to never stay silent again.
