The Prep School Negro

The lunchtime screening of André Lee’s film documentary “The Prep School Negro” called forth powerful and complicated feelings as we are immersed into Lee’s world and bore witness to his efforts to retroactively make meaning about his years at the Germantown Friends School in PA.

The film lays bare issues related to race, class, family loyalties, self-loathing, and the undeniable role educators can play in the lives of students, for better or for worse.  While it is unwise to assume experiences are universal, the universality in the film lies in the details of the narrative and the connections to what many of us might witness in our schools today; students that feel the responsibility to speak to one’s lived experience in the classroom, simply because they alone are the only ones in the room who can, feeling “too” Black at school, but being regarded as adopting White ways of speaking and behaving at home, and the disconnect that can happen when parents live outside the realm of the norm among the parent community, feeling immensely proud, but also unaccustomed to, and unable to navigate, the school culture.

Director André Lee

Lee said he came up with the title “in ninth grade”

There was a sense of urgency about the story- that this is a  story that demanded to be told, and it was told in a way that rendered the story itself undeniably true.

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