As she explains in a voiceover during an expositional montage, there are two versions of Starr. The first, is the Starr from Garden Heights. She loves her family, and her Black community. Through her father, she's learned to be proud of who she is. But she also knows that her identity comes with its share of burdens and complications. On the one hand, there's the constant threat of violence from gangs who rule the neighborhood. But there's also the menace from external factors: from the police, from strangers who might look at her askance, and even from her school friends, who inadvertently dismiss her Blackness as tangential to who she is through a constant stream of micro-aggressions.