Deconstructing the “Work Ethic” Myth
The young protagonist of this story is all-too-familiar with the refrain passed down from generation to generation among African American society that mandates the admission that they must work twice as hard as whites just be recognized as being equal. This would be horrible enough if true, but the cruel reality is that even this is not the genuine truth about privilege in America. Most of the boys who attend the exclusive private school are white and don’t have to work at all to get things which will forever remain unavailable to not just blacks, but poorer whites. Riverdale Academy Day School becomes a microcosm of American society where the truth is that whether one works twice has hard, five times as hard, ten or twenty or a hundred times as hard or more than those born into privilege, they will never be afforded the opportunity rise to a level of equitable treatment.
Systemic Racism
The primary individual antagonist in the story is Andy Peterson, a MAGA-hat wearing white jock who simply can’t get past losing his position as starting QB to a black kid. Andy spends most of the story in a constant state of childish rage which only gets worse when an attempted prank goes wrong and he winds up turning his skin green. The MAGA hat implicates a generational link to racist thinking suggesting the difficulty of breaking the process. Once Andy forcibly finds himself standing in the shoes of those who are treated badly simply because of skin color, however, the book offers an optimistic outlook that it could possibly take something as simple as altering the perspective of racists to break the system.
Inequitable Education
Drew is tapped to become a student ambassador facilitating a visit by mostly African American students from a much poorer school. These students are appropriately disgusted by the difference between the education environments of the two schools which strongly links the better conditions to the consequences of racism. This link is made all the more concrete by the embarrassing attempt by one of Drew’s teachers to pronounce the “black” names of the students from the visiting school. What is being explored here is a theme going far beyond mere economic inequality to hint that the educational “failures” of minority schools is inextricably linked to not just a lack of money, but a culture clash with a systemic approach to teaching based on outmoded policies devised when schools were routinely segregated in America.
