New Boy

New Boy suggests that racism comes in two main types: racism due to ignorance, and racism due to power-lust. Racism due to ignorance arises when a person has limited personal experience with people of other races and so relies on stereotypes or faulty information about people of other races. For example, when White American sixth-grader Dee meets her new classmate, Black Ghanaian Osei, she has never had a Black classmate before. Her only personal…

New Boy examines how status influences human relationships. Status-seeking motivates many people’s behavior, whether those people are children or adults. When Osei, the sixth-grader son of a Ghanaian diplomat to the U.S., transfers to a new all-White school in Washington, D.C., he immediately struggles to attain enough status that he can “get through the day without getting beaten up”—a struggle made more difficult because he is Black in a society that, through systemic and…

New Boy represents adolescent romance as multifaceted, motivated by curiosity and experimentation on the one hand and genuine feeling on the other. Yet regardless of an adolescent romance’s motivations, the novel suggests that it is more dangerous for girls than boys due to gendered double standards about romantic and sexual behavior. The novel represents the heterogeneity of adolescent romance through two sixth-grade couples, Mimi and Ian on the one hand and Dee and Osei on…

While New Boy is primarily concerned with harmful status hierarchies that are widely acknowledged as harmful—racist and gender-based status hierarchies, for example—it also suggests that status hierarchies based on age can be harmful: when teenagers and adults condescend to children, the older parties miss the potentially life-and-death importance of children’s struggles. The novel, a retelling of Shakespeare’s Othello, makes the interesting choice to reinterpret the main characters, who are adults in the play, as…