Last night in Atlanta, I performed one of Bri’s verses.
Though she refrained from rapping for us in New York, here’s a clip of her reciting one of Bri’s raps-and killing it!-at an event in Atlanta. She discussed hip-hop classics like “Rapper’s Delight,” which launched the genre into the mainstream, and “The Message,” both of which are on the official On the Come Up playlist on Spotify. “To know where you’re going, you have to know where you come from,” Thomas said, a sentiment which applies to her upbringing in Jackson and her and Bri’s shared love of hip-hop, a movement that, “in so many ways was built on the backs of women.” Like her protagonist, she also experienced poverty in her youth Thomas got her own come up in 2016 when she landed a major two-book deal with HarperCollins. Thomas said that Garden Heights is based on where she grew up in Jackson, Mississippi, the city where she continues to live-and which gives Bri her surname. Make some noise, even when it makes others uncomfortable.”
“Be loud, black girl, be angry when you want,” Thomas said, to Bri and to any young girls in the audience who saw themselves in her character. Like so many others, Bri has “to work twice as hard to be considered half as good.” Thomas talked about how black girls are often seen as either too much or not enough-never in the middle. The incident lingers in the collective consciousness of Garden Heights’s residents and works its way into one of Bri’s raps: “Unarmed and dangerous / but America, you made us / only time we famous / is when we die and you blame us.”Īt school, Bri is characterized as being “argumentative,” “frequently aggressive,” and having “behavioral issues.” In other words, she’s stereotyped as an “angry black girl,” disproportionately punished for speaking up in class or making an offhand remark. Just as the genre emerged from the Bronx burning in the 1970s, the young rapper’s career begins in the wake of police brutality in her neighborhood. Thomas discussed how Bri’s story mirrors the story of hip-hop.
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