Reel & Meal Screens CodeSwitching
On Monday, February 15, Reel and Meal will screen CodeSwitching, a 2019 film about a voluntary school desegregation program that bused Boston youth to better-resourced suburban schools starting in the 1970s. Greenbelt Recreation Department sponsors the film as one of its Black History Month educational offerings. The film begins at 7 p.m. via Zoom; entry starts at 6:45 p.m. Registration is required at tinyurl.com/ReelandMealFeb.
Five Black alumni of a Boston school integration effort talk about the upsides and drawbacks of being bused for a better education. Most achieve enviable academic success. It wasn’t easy, however, for them to navigate between their urban neighborhood and their predominantly affluent white schools. “Code switching” means flipping between dialects in conversation. One girl in the film says, for instance, that she needed to not talk “too Black,” when in a white community. But code switching means more than language use. Shuttling between highly segregated worlds, the students feel ill at ease having to present themselves differently in the suburbs than in their urban environment, feeling estranged from their friends at home while being isolated at school and perhaps marked for arrest or harassment based on the color of their skin. The film raises questions about how schools can better support middle school and high school teens in such situations.
Jonathan Hutto, coordinator of the Prince George’s People’s Coalition, will lead the discussion following the film. Hutto co-authored an influential paper on the history of police accountability in Prince George’s County in the Journal of Urban Health in 2016 (ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4824689).
Greenbelt’s Co-op Grocery will once again offer a vegan meal for purchase: macro vegetarian chickpea masala and samosa dumplings with rice and a steamed vegetable. Order at 301-474-0522 by 1 p.m. on February 15 for pickup between 4 and 7 p.m. at the deli. Depending on demand, there may be dinners on a walk-in basis, if not pre-ordered.
Reel and Meal is organized by the Beaverdam Creek Watershed Watch Group, Green Vegan Networking, the Utopia Film Festival and the Prince George’s County Peace and Justice Coalition. For further information on this month’s program, check out Reel and Meal’s Facebook page (facebook.com/reelandmealNDC), the website of the New Deal Café, or contact Donna Hoffmeister of the Peace and Justice Coalition at 301-441-9377.
