Nya, a public school teacher at an overcrowded and underfunded city high school, writes the words of Gwendolyn Brooks’s 1959 poem “We Real Cool” on the board for her students. What was once her favorite lesson plan has become an anxiety trip as the poem now has a face: that of her seventeen-year-old son Omari. Nya believed that she had saved him from the school-to-prison pipeline when she and her ex-husband Xavier sent Omari to a majority white boarding school upstate. However, when she gets a call from the school informing her that Omari got into a fight with his English teacher during class, she worries that Brooks’ prophecy of doomed youth is about to come true.
Omari has tunnel vision and the only way he can see himself surviving this incident is by running away from a school that threatens to crush him under the weight of representation. He feels tokenized by his teachers and his peers as a Black student from the inner-city who “got out” when all Omari wants is to be a regular teenager. He is angry and lost and he thinks, maybe, he can be free from the suffocation of the prep school if he just runs. Of course, his girlfriend Jasmine would never tell Nya of her son’s plans, even when she comes knocking on her dorm room door, demanding answers.
Whether at Nya’s indigent public school or in the spotless hallways of Omari’s boarding school, the American education system is failing. However, as the school board debates pressing charges against Omari, they see the situation as quite black and white. Nya is trying to do her best to raise a young Black man in 2017, begging Omari, "tell me how to save you,” to the rhythmic underscoring of Gwendolyn Brooks’ poetry. “We Real Cool. We/Left school. We/Lurk late. We/Strike straight. We/Sing sin. We/Thin gin. We/Jazz June. We/Die soon.”
—Fiona Selmi