Black Boy White School (review)

When one of his best friends is killed, Ant Jones decides he's ready to leave his dangerous East Cleveland neighborhood, and he accepts a scholarship to Belton Academy, a boarding school in Maine. Fitting in there proves to be tough: the school is mostly white, and the locals are tense about an influx of Somali immigrants whom they perceive as taking their jobs. A large part of Ant's education revolves around figuring out how things work in a mixed-race environment; his sort-of girlfriend, Gloria, accuses George, the school's basketball star, of being an "Uncle Tom," while George sees Gloria as "the worst kind of black girl in the world, reinforcing every negative stereotype she can find, crying racism when something doesn't go her way, intimidating white folks with all that stupid attitude." As Ant tries to sort out his own identity in the midst of these confusing messages, he runs afoul of one more important cultural difference: his instincts to retaliate for some mild hazing threaten to turn him into the negative stereotype of a violent black boy among his white peers. Ant's a compelling and sympathetic character, and the explorations of identity and how it relates to milieu are interesting, especially in the way Ant often must grapple with people's expectations of him. This would be a good companion piece for books like Matt de la Pena's Mexican Whiteboy (BCCB 10/08), Sherman Alexie's The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (BCCB 10/07), and Walter Dean Myers' The Beast (BCCB 1/04) in an in-depth exploration of racial identity in contemporary school culture.