Post by Pat Shelly
Periscope by Nancy J. Smyth
Thirty years before our current election cycle’s talk about racial disparities, killings streamed on Facebook and the rise of the #Occupy and #Blacklivesmatter movement, a young Black man was offered an opportunity for what he hoped was a better life. André Robert Lee’s full scholarship to attend a Philadelphia prep school was supposed to be his way out of the ghetto, but this elite education came at a high personal cost.
Prep School Negro documents André’s journey back in time to revisit the events of his adolescence while also spending time with present-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.
A screening of Prep School Negro was held on September 19, 2016 as part of the University at Buffalo’s School of Social Work series on Social Work and Emerging Technologies, led by affiliated faculty member Mike Langlois, a clinical social worker and educator. After the screening, Mike engaged André Lee, the director of Prep School Negro and producer, civil rights educator and activist, in a discussion on race, racism, the seismic shifts in technology and how to leverage emerging technologies in the fight for social justice.
André Robert Lee, filmmaker
Mike Langlois, LICSW
Full-length version of Prep School Negro is now available on PBS
(through Feb. 10, 2017):
http://www.pbs.org/video/2365172448/
Here are links to the Periscope recordings:
- Intro (part 1 – 10 min.):
https://www.periscope.tv/w/1ZkKzWrWpWqGv - Discussion (part 2 – 49 min.):
https://www.periscope.tv/w/1yNxanvAkXVKj - Discussion (part 3 – 10 min.):
https://www.periscope.tv/w/1yNxanvdEYDKj
We welcome any comments, and will pass any received along to André and Mike.
