Continuing Ed Presents: Back to School With The Prep School Negro
/Friday, September 19th, 7:30pm
Saturday, September 20th, 4:00pm
Continuing Ed Presents: Back to School With The Prep School Negro
Back By Popular Demand!
The Prep School Negro
André Robert Lee, 2012, 71 min.
André Robert Lee and his sister grew up in the ghettos of Philadelphia. Their mother struggled to support them by putting strings in the waistbands of track pants and swimsuits in a local factory. When Andre was 14 years old, he received what his family believed to be a golden ticket – a full scholarship to attend one of the most prestigious prep schools in the country. Elite education was Andre’s way up and out, but at what price? Yes, the exorbitant tuition was covered, but this new world cost him and his family much more than anyone could have anticipated.
In The Prep School Negro, André takes a journey back in time to revisit the events of his adolescence while also spending time with current day prep school students of color and their classmates to see how much has really changed inside the ivory tower. What he discovers along the way is the poignant and unapologetic truth about who really pays the consequences for yesterday’s accelerated desegregation and today’s racial naiveté.
The screening on Friday, September 19th at 7:30pm will be followed by a Q&A with director André Robert Lee and writer Ayana Mathis.
The screening on Saturday, September 20th at 4:00pm will be followed by a Q&A with director André Robert Lee and scholar Paul M. Farber.
Ayana Mathis is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and a recipient of the2014-15 New York Public Library's Cullman Center Fellowship. The Twelve Tribes of Hattie, her first novel, a New York Times Bestseller and a 2013 New York Times Notable Book of the Year 2013, was chosen by Oprah Winfrey as the second selection for Oprah's Book Club 2.0.
Paul M. Farber is a scholar of American and Urban Studies. He has a PhD in American Culture from the University of Michigan, and currently is a Postdoctoral Writing Fellow at Haverford College. He is the curator of the exhibition, The Wall in Our Heads: American Artists and the Berlin Wall for the Goethe-Institut Washington DC, opening in October 2014, and is co-curator of the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage-funded public history project, Monument Lab: Creative Speculations for Philadelphia,slated for Spring 2015. He also has contributed essays and helped produce several photography books including This Is the Day: The March on Washington (Getty Publications, 2013). @paul_farber
Continuing Ed is on-going series presenting films and speakers in order to advance discussion about the future of education and education reform.
Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JbpVKZYWNQc
BPT: http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/861570
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/1533340073563809
