THUG LIFE: Our Children will Change the World

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My 13 year old asked to watch the movie: The Hate U Give. While I had heard about the film, I never had the opportunity to watch it before now. She asked to watch it because her and a friend had read the book.

My mind was blown by the whole experience.

THUG LIFE is a tattoo Tupac Shakur had and it meant: The Hate U Give Little Infants Fucks Everyone. It speaks to the cycle of pain and violence passed down from generation to generation. It is known that a significant source of that generational pain was and continues unfortunately to be the systemic racism that he and many others face growing up black in the United States.

The Hate U Give, which is streaming on Disney+, is a powerful story, and without providing any spoilers, I'll say it's a movie every family should watch and that it brought my 10 year old son to tears at the end; a movie that can be shared with the kids and that can help spark important dialogue.

I've been speaking with my kids over the past few years about racism. With them being mixed race themselves, it's a necessary conversation. The Black Lives Matter protests from last year were a necessary and important time that I felt my kids needed to be aware of and engaged with. And although we are not black and do not face the same difficulties, my children must learn empathy and compassion, as well as learn to have difficult conversations in order to be change agents of the future.

I feel it's my job and responsibility, as their mother, to inform them of world events and movements that are taking place during their childhoods, as their engagement will help frame their view of the world, and of others, and of what they can do to make change.

The fact that my daughter brought this film to my attention, at the time of the prosecution of Chauvin for the murder of George Floyd, was what made the experience powerful for me.

To see that at 13, she was learning and engaging with stories of black lives and experiences, and wanted to share them with her brother and I, just felt as though she, and we by proxy, are on the right path. She gave me hope for the future.