The Black Kids
Publisher: Simon Schuster Books for Young Readers
Release Date: August 4, 2020
Genre: Young Adult Contemporary
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Perfect for fans of The Hate U Give, this unforgettable coming-of-age debut novel explores issues of race, class, and violence through the eyes of a wealthy black teenager whose family gets caught in the vortex of the 1992 Rodney King Riots.
Los Angeles, 1992
Ashley Bennett and her friends are living the charmed life. It’s the end of senior year and they’re spending more time at the beach than in the classroom. They can already feel the sunny days and endless possibilities of summer.
Everything changes one afternoon in April, when four LAPD officers are acquitted after beating a black man named Rodney King half to death. Suddenly, Ashley’s not just one of the girls. She’s one of the black kids.
As violent protests engulf LA and the city burns, Ashley tries to continue on as if life were normal. Even as her self-destructive sister gets dangerously involved in the riots. Even as the model black family façade her wealthy and prominent parents have built starts to crumble. Even as her best friends help spread a rumor that could completely derail the future of her classmate and fellow black kid, LaShawn Johnson.
With her world splintering around her, Ashley, along with the rest of LA, is left to question who is the us? And who is the them?
Author Information
Christina Hammonds Reed holds an MFA in Film and Television Production from the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts. Her short fiction has previously appeared in the Santa Monica Review. She lives in Hermosa Beach, CA.
Being one of the only black kids in a predominantly white neighborhood can be an isolating experience. I should know, I lived that life myself about a decade ago. In LA, there were definitely black kids, but Ashley’s parents had money, so she spent much of her time with her upper-class white friends. She considers the girls to have been her friends for years, but even she has bad memories of them. Things that they said to her in the past that she knew were wrong, that really hurt, but that she chose to brush off to maintain her friendship. At the same time, she knows that she will never be the same as them. If they are caught loitering in an uninhabited house, she knows that the cops may let her friends off the hook and try to detain her. She knows that no matter how her friends act, she has to have up a guard around them because she is always the odd one out in a bad situation. Ashley has gotten through her 12 years of school this way, and she is looking forward to just going into college. Then, the Rodney King riots begin. And the city begins to fracture into factions, her friend group included.
There is a lot going on in this book, between Ashley’s relationship with her friends to her broken relationship with her sister, to her relationship with classmates that she hasn’t spent much time with, to her families’ backstory. Sometimes I did feel a bit overwhelmed by all this information, but I could keep a general idea of where the story was going. Ashley was a difficult character for me to relate to at the start, as it was rather obvious to me that she was incorrect in some of her views on things. Then the story kept moving, she kept learning, and I felt like she was one of the most real teenaged characters I had ever read by the end of the book.
This book touched on many aspects of black American life, from having those who are always wanting to fight to improve things in this country to those who want to follow the system out of fear and past experiences. No characters were perfect, they all had flaws, and they all were forced to face those flaws in one way or another by the end of the novel.
It was also interesting to hear about how these riots played out. They happened 8 years before I was BORN, but the situation, both socially in the community and politically at the government level, seems to be the same in 2020. Nearly three decades since this incident occurred, similar incidents are still occurring. And unlike many books about protesting police brutality/the flawed justice system, this book features a character who isn’t on the front lines. Ashley isn’t personally related to King, and her parents don’t even live in a neighborhood that is over-policed in LA. They would have had to go out of their neighborhood to attend any protests or riots, and the fact that Ashley was separated in this way would make her story more relatable for the average reader who may also not live in a place where the protests are not happening right outside their front doors.
I would recommend this book to anyone looking for a fictional novel about the Rodney King riots to educate themselves or introduce the topic to high-schoolers and adults.
I received a copy of this book and this is my voluntary review.
15 Thoughts While Reading (No large spoilers, mostly about the individual characters introductions)
- Why do they always have the videos of those being killed by police on a loop? Who wants to see someone dying on constant news replay?
- We are only 4% in and I am already fed up with Heather’s shallow “gender inequality = racism” attitude.
- Oof I already know Kim is going to be a problem too, I wish Ashley had better friends! Kim should have been on the side of her lifelong friend, not on the side of someone that she just met 5 seconds ago.
- There is something more serious going on with Jo. I don’t think that it is what Ashley’s parents believe it to be, but maybe Ashley will remember something from their childhood. Not sure if her parents know more than what they are telling Ashley.
- If the police weren’t given an overabundance of money to patrol neighborhoods and instead that money went to providing opportunities to those that live there to live comfortably in nice homes, the results would last longer.
- I wish that Jo and Ashley had a stronger relationship. Not sure how things were on Jo’s side, but Ashley clearly has had struggles with being one of the only black kids in her neighborhood. If the family had banded together rather than ignoring/blocking out the issues, a lot of the stress could have been taken off the kids.
- I’m not sure how to feel about the parents? On one hand, they seem to be good parents, but on the other hand, they seem to ignore the situation that they put their children in by raising them in a majority rich/white neighborhood.
- Honestly, I ship Ashley and Lashawn so much, not sure if they are going to go anywhere with them, but I feel like they might be a good fit for one another. Better than any of the other guys that Ashley hangs out with now for sure.
- Why doesn’t Ashley see how awful her friends truly are to others? It’s not like they try to hide it at all, surely there have to be better people in her school to hang out with. But then again, I KNOW how stressful it can be to leave a toxic friend group. Hopefully, she will have better ones by the end of the book, but I don’t know who else she has to choose from at her school.
- It is so interesting to see the contrast between the protests and how they affect the more affluent areas of LA, to the more populated areas, to how people were reacting across the country in places like New York. I’ve always lived in a city once I actually noticed the police brutality protests and/or riots occurring, (2011-) so I never really thought of how those protests would look to someone who lives in a suburb, rich neighborhood, or a rural neighborhood.
- Parents always believe that they are helping their black kids move up in life by putting them into “better” schools, but this book shows that it may not be the truth. I hope that parents continue reading books like this to hear the parts of the story that their children may not be telling them about their public/private school experiences in these types of schools.
- I like that this book mentioned aspects of the AIDS epidemic, which was also occurring in the 90s. I never really thought about how many different groups were going through there own crises during these years that were not that long ago.
- As a current college student, I can say that I did not learn anything about the Rodney King riots or the AIDs crisis in high school. Once we reached the end of WWII in history class, we brushed over the Civil Rights Movement, brushed over the Vietnam and Korean Wars, mentioned briefly the end of the Cold War and some of the Gulf War. I’m too young to know about these things on my own (born in 2000) but they are still teaching students as if we are living in the 80s-90s and “keeping up with current events.” Most of my knowledge of the past 50 years in America/the world has come from documentaries, social media, and books like this.
- The inclusion of Lucia was interesting, Ashley having an immigrant nanny did open up a lot of discussion about LA’s immigrant community that may not have been addressed otherwise.
- Very mixed feelings about Ashley’s mom, she feels very distanced from her daughters rather than really noticing their struggles and connecting with them.
