“The Prep School Negro,” a documentary about a young black man’s experiences while attending a prestigious, mostly white preparatory school, will be screened on Thursday (Feb. 18) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
“The Prep School Negro,” a documentary about a young black man’s experiences while attending a prestigious, mostly white preparatory school, will be screened on Thursday (Feb. 18) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Director André Robert Lee, who made the autobiographical film, and executive producer and UNC alumna Barb Lee will answer questions and discuss the film afterward.
The free public program will be from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. in the Nelson Mandela Auditorium of the FedEx Global Education Center, on the corner of McCauley and Pittsboro Streets. Most campus parking lots are not ticketed after 5 p.m.
In the 1980s, when Lee was 14, he received a full scholarship to attend Germantown Friends School in Philadelphia through its community scholars program. Accustomed to his neighbors in the city’s ghettos, he suddenly was spending his days with students whose names were synonymous with those of city department stores, companies and factories. And when he went home each day, he had to change contexts again.
In his film, Lee himself is interviewed, as are black students currently attending prestigious prep schools and their classmates. One issue for such students is the responsibility of being the only black person that some of the other students know.
“Because of the population of North Carolina, we have some students who have never been exposed to students of another color until they come here,” said Cookie Newsom of the UNC Office of Diversity and Multicultural Affairs, which is sponsoring the program with the UNC Alumni Committee on Racial and Ethnic Diversity. “This could be true for black students or for white students. So I think some of our students may see some of the things they go through in this documentary.”
For more information, visit www.theprepschoolnegro.org.
Note: Newsom can be reached at (919) 962-6962 or newsom@email.unc.edu
UNC Alumni Committee on Racial and Ethnic Diversity contact: Ronda Manuel, (919) 843-3319, ronda_manuel@unc.edu
News Services contact: LJ Toler, (919) 962-8589 or (919) 219-6374