One new, one older:

Cross-X, by Joe Miller.

This is a GREAT story about inner city high school kids (Kansas City, MO) who go to a high school that has lost its accreditation and is classified as "academically deficient" but who nonetheless rank nationally in debate. How do they do it? Yeah, dedicated teacher. Yeah, personal attention. In some ways, it's a story that has been told frequently, but one of the things that makes this story stand out is that the writer, who is white, is writing as much about the process of realizing the assumptions that he has made about the kids, not even necessarily the most obviously racist ones like Inner City Black Kids Are Scary, but more like Debate Is A Meritocracy or Debate Is Color Blind or even the whole idea about how the white debate coach and the white journalist can help the kids overcome institutional and personal obstacles, and challenging the assumptions in the context of his relationship to the kids, to debate in general, to himself, to other adults in the debate world, etc. It is GREAT. The only real criticism I have is that he too frequently ends a chapter by saying, "Little did I know that just a few days later, my entire outlook on debate -- indeed, my entire outlook on life -- would change!" I mean, it's mostly true, but his entire outlook changes like five times in the book. And framing it as he does, it seems like he's going to switch opinions 180 degrees each time, when really it's more like uncovering layers.

Color Blind, by Ellis Cose

This is the first book of his that I've read, but it certainly won't be the last. He's just this really great, balanced, powerful writer who questions some assumptions about various identity politics, and even though he and I agree on most issues, he still entertains the arguments of the opposition in a way that allows the reader to see what part is and what part is not reasonable. And what logically follows and what does not, and what assumptions are made in the arguments. And in some cases to see that there is no clear answer, like the question of whether bi- or multi-racial people should have separate race classifications (such as for the US Census) and what that means in the context of, for example, the fact that in one poll the majority of people who checked "biracial" were white people who had a grandparent who was thought to be exotic (but who was not actually of a different classifiable race), or what it means in the context of the South African apartheid model of white, black and "colored," all of this juxtaposed with examples of people in inter-racial marriages, say one is Black and one is white, and the problems that arise for the kids when they are asked or expected to identify as a single race, that that means they must deny a significant part of themselves and one parent. Etc. I'm loving it. I keep putting it down and discussing the issues with the cats