New School Friday: …And the Children Shall Lead

This Friday I am celebrating the New School, that rising generation of young men and women of all races who, having already demonstrated during this primary season their transcendence of the older generations’ divisive race politics, show in the following video their unwillingness to rely on traditional politics of race and intellectual difference.

I came across this short documentary, which asks African American and white high schools students to comment on the widely researched and reported Black/white achievement gap, as I was researching commentaries on race and educational attainment. The students in this video are thoughtful and independent. Their comments are a refreshing, inspiring challenge to the lazy, binaristic fashion in which racialized frameworks have traditionally been relied upon to explain differences in achievement whose roots are actually much more complex than some preconceived notion of the difference between Black and white people.

These young men and women’s refusal to accept out of hand the notion that white students do better than Black students in all educational contexts is but one more indication to me that the racial consciousness of the upcoming generation of scholars, workers, and activists is far more advanced than that of my parents’ generation, the baby boom generation, my own generation, or even that of the much storied generation x.