https://doi.org/10.67147/literariness.v1i3.049
Life in the Ghetto: Navigating Discrimination, Stereotypes and Black Resistance in Angie Thomas’s On the Come Up
HIBA NABIHA A.
Research Scholar
Dept of English
Government College, Malappuram
Affiliated to the University of Calicut
ORCID Id: 0009-0002-6129-8843
DR. ABDUL LATHEEF VENNAKKADAN
Associate Professor
Dept of English
Government Arts and Science College, Kondotty
Affiliated to the University of Calicut
ORCID Id: 0009-0000-8450-2056
Abstract: The Black community in the contemporary United States grapples with a set of challenges distinct from those faced by its enslaved ancestors. Although Emancipation symbolically broke the chains of slavery, systems of racial segregation and inequality persisted, binding Black Americans through invisible constraints operating within social, political, and legal spheres. In everyday life, Black individuals continue to encounter multiple forms of racial injustice. Resistance to such systemic racism—despite constitutional guarantees and anti-discrimination laws—manifests in diverse and complex ways across different domains of life.
Angie Thomas, in her novel On the Come Up, foregrounds the layered injustices experienced by Black communities in present-day America and explores the various modes of resistance that emerge in response. This paper analyses the novel to unravel the levels of discrimination towards Black people and to identify patterns of resistance within Black communities, with particular attention to Black youth. Young Black Americans not only confront systemic racism that reduces them to damaging stereotypes—such as hoodlums, drug dealers, and gangsters—but are also compelled to navigate the marginal spaces into which they are pushed without internalising or performing these imposed identities. The paper argues that the novel resists the commodification of Black rage and critiques the expectation that Black resistance must conform to roles prescribed by racist structures. Further, it examines how Thomas interrogates the limits of Fanonian violence as an effective mode of resistance within the post–Civil Rights context of the United States.
Keywords: Black Resistance, Stereotyping, Systemic Racism, Black Youth, Contemporary America
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