“Eat your breakfast, son.”
Chuck is Jordan’s father. Although this “companion piece” to New Kid shifts the focus of the story to Drew Ellis, it commences with a view of Jordan getting ready for his second year at the private school. At breakfast before the first day of school, Jordan’s mother excitedly announces that since he made it through his first year, he only has five more to go. This directly contradicts his own plans to start ninth grade in art school which forwards as an alternate proposal that ends with a desperate appeal for assistance to Chuck, “right, dad?” The above response is all the help he gets, however. This exchange reveals that nothing has changed in Jordan’s domestic sphere since the previous book. His mother is the dominant force in the family and the father he looks to simply as an equal weight to balance he scales of authority continues to retreat into submission, suggesting tough times ahead for Jordan relative to his dreams of art school.
“I just can’t be myself at the school. I gotta be more!”
This complaint by Drew is one of the main points of the book. Yes, it’s great for schools designed primarily for the purpose of segregating the privileged white elite from real life to offer financial assistance opportunities to underprivileged minorities in an attempt to retroactively make up for decades of such behavior, but even when this opportunity is afforded it still comes with the same old school expectations. Historically speaking, generations of black kids have constantly had it driven into them that they will be expected to work twice as hard just to produce the same results expects from whites. This is psychological torture at any level, but in an environment dominated by immaturity it becomes a truly devious experiment in setting up people to fail who already know going in they are expected to fail. What Jordan is expressing here is something along the lines of the subject of this experiment: not only must the black kids attending this school work harder to prove they belong there in the first place, but they are expected to undergo social alterations in order to make everyone else feel comfortable around them when, if anything, it should be the other way around.
“Phones down, nothing in your hands. Keep them where he can see them. And don’t say a word.”
Although not really representative of the whole, one scene in this graphic novel really stands for creating a sense of tension. Jordan’s dad is doing nothing more than driving his son and his son’s friend into a neighborhood populated probably exclusively by very, very rich white families when he is flagged by a police for a traffic stop. In another story, this could play in any number of different ways, none of them good. But the author engages in a little subversion that makes several points so subtle there is a real danger the whole point of the scene will be lost on some. Instead of portraying the officer as a outright racist, he instead comes across as just another example of more prevalent type of white person simply doesn’t get or appreciate the racial undertones to everyday behavior they genuinely consider inoffensive. This is just a cop doing his job rather than a true villain, but it is his obliviousness to the tension created merely by the act of a white cop pulling over a black man driving a car that becomes the real villainous entity here.
