Admissions: A Memoir of Surviving Boarding School by Kendra James

Admissions: A Memoir of Surviving Boarding School Reviews

• 
  Traci Thomas

  I liked this book a good deal. Humor. Candor. Retrospection that wasn’t entirely cliched. Taft (and NE indie boarding schools)sounds exactly like what you’d expect. James brought the world to life. My biggest issue was the book was too long and lost it’s way before the end. Overall very strong and entertaining and easy to read.
• 
  Lisa

  [3.25] This book was a mixed bag. I found myself mostly bored by the author's daily experiences at boarding school and her obsession with online role playing. As a Black student, James didn't fit in at Taft, but it wasn't until years later that she realized what a big role racism played in her unhappiness. As a result, the sections about her experiences at school had a weird dissonance. The second part of the book, where she described the microagressions directed toward her (and other Black students) was more powerful.
• 
  Nevin

  I really really wanted to love this book.It ended up being an OK book for me in the end.
  
  It’s about an adolescent Black girl who’s father was a graduate of a very elite, predominantly White private school in Connecticut. Kendra (his daughter) is a legacy student attending the same school.
  
  The whole book is pretty much about her experiences during the three years she studied there.
  
  Honestly I was expecting so much more from this book. But it fell short for me. First half of the book felt like “coming of age” biography. Who was wearing what? Who had money? Who didn’t? Who was wearing their hair how? Who came from where? Etc etc. Pretty much all the same stuff any teenager would worry about. I found it boring and unnecessary.
  
  The second half of the book delves more into the important issues such as racism by other students, daily verbal insults, derogatory or negative attitudes towards students of non white ethnicity. But even these issues were scratched on the surface. Again disappointing!
  
  Pretty much very little was included about her job being a admissions officer, specializing in diversity recruitment for independent schools. I would have found that part to be much more fascinating and engaging.
  
  Some parts where witty, some parts were heartbreaking and some parts were hopefully.
  
  Over all a solid ⭐️⭐️⭐️ for me.
• 
  Renata

  This was fun for me because I think I'm basically the same age as Kendra so I enjoyed the reminiscing about LiveJournal/AIM and such, which is obviously not the main point of the book. I think at this point in my educational journey I'm not shocked by the microaggressions (and macroaggressions) Kendra experienced as a Black student at a prestigious, majority white boarding school, but I don't think it was trying to be, like,
  Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. It's her own memoir and her own changing perspective on education.
  
  I think this would be a great Alex award book--an adult memoir with a lot of teen appeal, especially since boarding school is such an intriguing concept.
• 
  MookNana

  This is fascinating, horrifying, and sad all at once. I'm glad to have heard the author's experience, but furious at what was allowed to happen and devastated by what it cost her. The extra burdens placed on the author didn't belong on a teenager, who should have been able to learn and grow as her nerdgirl self without being asked to put up with endless insults and injustices, to say nothing of everyday microaggressions and othering. I hope telling her story was cathartic and that it reaches people who need to hear it.
  
  Many thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for the opportunity to read and review!
• 
  Caitie

  This is incredibly disappointing for me, I am fascinated by boarding schools and I thought this would make an interesting read about a woman of color attending one of these elite boarding schools. While Kendra James is a legacy at the Taft School, I found her to be boring and annoying at the same time. She kept going on and on about how "weird," she was at the time, and how hard it was to make friends at first. While she did mention microaggressions that she faced, she didn't really go into much detail.....it felt very surface level to me. I feel like I got more from the book's introduction than from the rest of the book. I wanted more boarding school traditions, more about the classes, more about how diversity was handled. It lacked depth in my opinion. I guess I was expecting something more from this, it's hard to explain why I didn't like this so much. Part of me felt like Kendra James expected people to just know about how these boarding schools operate (she went to Taft, but other examples of these elite schools are: St. Paul's, Philips Exeter, Andover, etc.) even though they're all different. Not was I was expecting and I was deeply disappointed.
• 
  Elsie Birnbaum

  I've been excited about this book since Kendra James announced it on her twitter months ago. As someone who attended a New England boarding school (albeit one that's more of a feeder for Oberlin than the Ivies), I'm always interested in honest looks at the student culture since as James' points out books about boarding schools are often inaccurate. I was not disappointed.
  
  I read this book in the course of six hours. James' classic wit (I regularly think about her piece about the American Girl Doll store) makes what could have been a very slow look at three years of high school legitimately a page turner. God this book cured me of my early 20s high school nostalgia. It really feels like what it was like to be a student at one of these institutions and I say this as someone who obviously did not experience the racial ostracization and discrimination that is the main focus of the book. That said her description of honor court and the school's handling of her supposed guilt felt eerily familiar to my own experiences with gender violence in high school. So too did her description of returning to campus when the buildings are a site of trauma. I only wish she had talked more about the contradictory feelings of hating the social element of your private school experience and feeling as though the administration of the school was not on your side but benefiting from the academic experiences, a contradiction that I'm still trying to work out in my own life.
  
  This isn't related to anything and was only one paragraph in the book but James states that she didn't apply to Smith College because it had Greek Life. Smith College doesn't have Greek Life?? It's very culturally similar to Oberlin, although obviously lacking a cis male population which was clearly (and justifiably) important to teenage Kendra James. I'm not sure how she came to the conclusion that a women's college in the lesbian capitol of the United States is a buttoned up institution but I'm sorry she's just wrong. Again this is a non-sequitur, I loved this book, its great and you should read it, I just couldn't stand for this Smith slander.
• 
  Cayla Sparkman

  ADMISSIONS: A Memoir of Surviving Boarding School by Kendra James is an insightful introspection from the first African-American legacy student to graduate from one of the world’s most elite prep schools.
  
  When I first read the subtitle about this being a boarding school memoir I was excited. Okay, where are my Zoey 101, Strange Days at Blake Holsey High, and Blood & Water fans who had youthful dreams of attending an elite prep and/or boarding school? I definitely dreamed of moving away from home in my teens, getting a world-class education, and having my pick at Ivy League Institutions. But the unfortunate reality is that many of these schools like Choate (shoutout to my Power fans) and Taft weren't built with Black people or any people of color in mind.
  
  I really enjoyed the vulnerability, evolution, and raw humor of this book. This is another memoir that felt like I was reading a YA novel with built-in reflections and lessons that she learned. The middle was filled with some details and happenings that made the book a little longer than I think it needed to be; otherwise, I enjoyed the moments of nostalgia, blerdism, and high school drama.
  
  Thank you to Grand Central Publishing for this advanced reader’s copy!
• 
  Brynn | readyourworriesaway

  Admissions is an honest memoir detailing an alumna’s experience as a student at The Taft School. Kendra James was the first African-American legacy student to graduate from Taft. While working as an admissions officer as an adult, she couldn’t help but reflect back on her own time at an independent prep school and feel as though she was selling a lie.
  
  Kendra is an incredible writer. As she detailed her story, there were times that were humorous, times that were completely devastating, and everything in-between. Kendra shared great insights on how students of color were treated differently, and how the journey to change has been slow-going. She is vulnerable in sharing examples of racism and microaggressions that she experienced. I appreciated reading about Kendra’s evolution from student to professional. Admissions is an introspective memoir about a legacy student who graduated from one of the most elite prep schools.
• 
  Chandra Powers Wersch

  I don't usually review or really even like to rate memoirs, because it's their story, so who am I to judge how they should or shouldn't tell their experiences? But I decided to write this because I disagree with some of the other reviews. I think the coming-of-age aspect is strongly woven throughout the entire book. Each section (year of her life), and usually each chapter, ends by broadening out to discuss the larger issues of being a teenage WoC, albeit upper middle class (she acknowledges that privilege), at a prep school that really had/s no structures in place to deal with blatant racism, or the microaggressions that she and other BIPoC face(d). James is super reflective of how she's changed and matured since the mid aughts, especially by the end, and she details how her own social-emotional intelligence and empathy has increased, as she looks back on her teenage years. I definitely took a hard look at my past (even not so distant) and the ways I've unintentionally perpetuated microaggressions (even in my own head) towards/about others, so I came away introspective, as well.
  The nostalgia throughout the whole book was the cherry on top for my millennial self (graduating HS 1 year before James). I found a kindred spirit in someone who was unapologetically them-nerdy-self (unlike myself who was afraid to reveal a lot of my interests or hobbies for fear of being judged and ridiculed, even to my own friends). I found solace and even some healing in these parts.
  Again, I don't really like to rate memoirs, but I think if you enjoy memoirs or subjects like history and sociology, and/or if you're an older millennial, this is a book worth reading.
• 
  Katie

  I love a memoir that drops me in a world I know next to nothing about. I want to hear your stories, people. There are so many stories out there, and how lucky we are when they fall into the hands of the right storyteller.
  
  …like this one, which is about the complexities of being Black in that ne plus ultra of privileged, white-catering spaces: the New England boarding school.
  
  James and I are about the same age, and because of that, two things about this book in particular caught my eye: Number one, I can officially confirm that if you did any coming-of-age in the early aughts, it doesn’t matter if you were Black or white, or went to boarding school or not: that was a cringey-ass time. Lord, we had no idea what we were doing on social media, did we? The mall-forward fashion was EXCELLENT, though. (Heavy /s for those of you who regrettably missed out.) Also, holy hell, how did the 2000s become a day-of-yore under my very nose!?
  
  It’s fine, everything’s fine. I’m perfectly comfortably with my vanishing (vanished?) youth.
  
  Anyway.
  
  The second thing is that we have so, so far to go in the name of racial justice, but compared to my high school and college years, we’ve come a loooong way in how we think and talk about racism. I didn’t go to a boarding school, but my high school had a similar racial and economic makeup to Taft — that is to say, there were lots of rich white people who had no ability to comprehend there was a whole world out there that wasn’t rich and white. We had approximately zero awareness of our reeking privilege or of our microaggressions and our lack of inclusivity. We thought “racism” meant pointy white hats — end of list. James takes us to a time where we didn’t have the words to define what was happening around us. It’s still a work in progress, and our pace is far too slow, but we’ve got a whole generation* of humans now who know better and (are trying to) do better.
  
  If I were being more sharply critical, I might give this book three stars. I maybe wanted more inner conflict, more of the double—edged sword nature of boarding school. How did James reconcile her experiences with her subsequent success, and how did she ultimately choose to walk away from her role as an admissions counselor? Still, it’s not my story to tell, and I enjoyed her voice so much — the book is legit l-o-l funny — that I’m giving the edge to the ol’ heartstrings and giving this one that extra star.
  
  
  
  *Or at least >50% of a generation. Elections matter, don’t vote for racists, thank you for coming to my TedTalk.
• 
  Leigh Kramer

  Kendra James reflects on her experience as a Black legacy student at a mostly white prep school in this engaging memoir. She illustrates that it’s not enough to simply have marginalized people at your institution. The institution needs to demonstrably change to be truly inclusive and to protect newcomers from bigotry and hate. Her reflections about who is a part of institutional memory, especially given that she was a legacy student, were particularly interesting. The author is about ten years younger than me so I enjoyed reliving her pop culture interests from a different lens. She also admits where she went wrong as a teen, which was refreshing.
  
  It needed a stronger connection between her work in admissions and her school experience. It’s really only touched on in the intro and epilogue so that component should have either been expanded on or omitted. I would have loved to have heard how she decided to work in admissions and at those specific schools and what was the final straw that made her leave. Perhaps that will be the subject of her next book.
  
  Note: there are a lot of Harry Potter references with nary an acknowledgment of the JKR’s transphobia. I can see why HP might have meant something to the author, beyond also going to a boarding school but the degree to which it came up was jarring.
  
  CW: bullying, racism, racial slurs, microaggressions, misogynoir, sexual harassment, false accusation of theft, discussion of officer-involved shootings, homophobia (not toward or by author), homophobic slur, sexism, body commentary, death of classmates post-graduation (including murder-suicide and car accident), bierasure/biphobia (author states her only option at school as a straight Black girl was straight Black or Latinx boys), teacher convicted of possessing child pornography (post-graduation), author stole a goose egg from its nest and it did not hatch, vomit (food poisoning), underage drinking, inebriation, hangover, drug references, cigarettes, brother is adopted, witchcraft, STD stigma (not countered), conversation about an actor/character being “dickless”, gendered pejoratives, gender essentialist language, ableist language, frequent Harry Potter references, hyperbolic language around suicide, mention of teachers who had inappropriate relationships with students, mention of school that covered up sexual assault incidents for decades, mention of fatshaming (author’s friend), brief reference to disordered eating (not author), references to parents’ divorce (post-HS), reference to mom’s past miscarriage, reference to infidelity in movie
• 
  Olivia

  3.5 Stars. This was an incredibly compelling story from the memories of a Black student at the predominantly white boarding school in New England. James writes with humor and a candor that is easy to appreciate, and while it is difficult to ask for more from a memoir (these are people's lives and they don't owe us a deeper dive!), I still found myself wanting more retrospection on the memories she was sharing. Why was it so difficult for a teenaged-Kendra to fathom that her close friend was not applying to college programs? What undertones in the situation was she missing? How did Kendra end up working for independent schools and affiliate programs after college despite her feelings of nonacceptance during her time at Taft and her unwillingness to send her own children to a boarding school? But perhaps we are being left with the questions James has not worked out for herself yet, which in and of itself, is a vulnerable thing to share.
• 
  Bowman Dickson

  This was a good read and helped me process some stuff about my own elite school experience, both as a dumb white kid in the early 2000s and as a teacher now. I thought it was really strange that she didn’t talk more about her decision to work for admissions given her experience at Taft? Would have been really curious to hear more discussion of that
• 
  Lainey Stacks

  i wanted more stories of the boarding school. like crazy events that took place. i didn’t really get that
• 
  Ana Scoular

  Having only attended majority white institutions, I was very interested in this book! James fully acknowledged how insufferable she was as an teenager, which mollifies my critique a bit. I have a lot of the same lived experiences so this book was easy for me to relate to. Yet, I’m sorry to say, there were some boring parts! I wish James had reflected more on her experience post-Taft about the program she worked for. I think even though she reflected about her negative experiences in a majority white institution, it still had me googling the cost of tuition at Taft. I hope this gets more buzz!!
• 
  Kyle C

  This is an honest, fair-minded book. Kendra James reflects on her experiences coming to an elite boarding school, the Taft School, populated by rich white students whose wealth makes them oblivious to their own racist actions. They assume she is on financial aid and that she comes from New York City. When she tells the field hockey team that her brother was adopted, they guess that the child must have been adopted from Africa and are astounded to learn that a black family can adopt a black child in America. Her peers don't believe her when she says that her father was on the board of trustees. As a young adolescent she does not yet have the framework or language to understand these daily humiliations as racial microaggressions. She has not yet learned how to hear the covert racism in seemingly innocent remarks. Movingly, she writes about the mental calculus she made every time she entered a room (how white would it be? how much would she stand out?) and how she would collect Taft gear and sweaters to swaddle herself in a sense of belonging.
  
  James is a reflective memoirist with an even-balanced perspective. She does not deny the problems at the alternative public school or the privilege of attending a school like Taft, and she has high praise for a number of faculty. She confesses that she was an awkward, bratty teenager who only wanted to talk about a narrow range of topics (Lord of the Rings and Orland Bloom). With good humor, she tells an anecdote about a time she performed a magic ritual in her room to expel her roommate (a modern-day heiress who had condescendingly said to her "just because you're black doesn't mean you have to do your hair in the morning"). She has a wonderfully sardonic voice and subjects herself to her own irony (for example, she obstinately refused to accept a scholarship offer to Rutgers and decided to go to Oberlin -- on the grounds that Avery Brooks went there, only to be told mirthfully by her mother that Avery Brooks teaches at Rutgers).
  
  In short, her account is candid and self-aware, critical but also humble, and her critique of the institution is cogent. This is not an axe-to-grind diatribe but a perceptive examination of the bewildering privilege and hidden racism that operates in elite schools. Her criticism of the administration and its limp attempts to redress racism is trenchant and, at times, brutal. But where she is blunt, she is not bitter. I don't say this to give approval of "respectability politics" but to appreciate the objectivity of the book. Her story is a clarion call for schools to think of diversity work as more than just a statistical quotient or a brochure opportunity.
• 
  Brittany

  I am truly fascinated by boarding schools, and I love memoirs so I thought this would be right up my alley. I was really curious to see what the author experienced and what she has to say about these so called “elite” institutions.
  
  Overall this memoir unfortunately fell flat for me. It wasn’t bad at all, it was just ok. There was just something about it that wasn’t compelling enough for me. It wasn’t until the last half of the book when she did a did a deeper dive of the implications of racism at the institution she attended. The most interesting part surrounds what she experienced when a girl named Emma Hunt wrote an incredibly racist article in their school newspaper that basically discounted the experience of minorities at her school. But even the way she wrote about this lacked serious depth in my opinion.
  
  I appreciated the nostalgia of this memoir. I think the author and I are around the same age (I’m 31) and I had a good time reminiscing about the fashion trends, the emergence of chat rooms, Nokia brick cell phones and live journal. I think Kendra is a talented writer and I enjoyed her humor and candor throughout the book. She told many stories of her times at boarding school as a weird emo/gothic girl.
  
  I think what may have made this book just ok is it’s lack of focus and how surface level it sometimes felt. Some parts of the book are just about mundane things she dealt with at boarding school as a young weird girl, and then other parts were more intense with criticism of how these institutions can foster racism. The first half felt almost like a YA novel and the last half felt like a nonfiction book on race. I’m just really not sure what to make of this memoir.
  
• 
  Justin Nelson

  James pens a witty, raw, and slice-of-life memoir here. It reads very easily, like a YA novel almost. She tackles heavy concepts of race, diversity, and being "the Only One in the room" in honest ways while always maintaining her humor. I have heard James as a guest on a comics podcast that I listen to, so it was nice to dive deeper into her sarcasm. In the end, though, this is really a memoir about fitting in and growing up in the unique setting of boarding school.
  A few lines stood out for me, such as: "Like many Black people, the life I dreamed of was paid for with the American currency of a minor trauma." (111) This was a very powerful line that summarizes so much of the racial discourse books and articles that I've been reading the past few years.
  I resonated with her description of choosing friends and found families: "...I value choice in my friendships....I want to look at my friends and think to myself, 'I choose you.'" (256) Again, simple statements that pack a big punch, something that James excels at here.
  And, finally, a description that made me laugh out loud, just because if you know you know, as she calls Cracker Barrel "the sundown town of chain restaurants." (262)😂
  All in all, a solid read. Maybe not as "deep" as other memoirs out there, but an enjoyable voyage through one individual's experience.
  Our book club recently read Ace of Spades, and I found this nonfictional account to be more in the line of what I wanted from that fictional thriller, honestly.
• 
  Kara

  Kendra James’ memoir is written in an accessible, funny way and sheds light on boarding schools and their challenges with race and equity. Boarding schools remain mysterious entities to much of America, and so her detailed story of her experience at Taft explains these institutions well. Also, even if readers have not attended or experienced boarding school, the themes of race, privilege, painful adolescence and friendship will resonate.
  
  More specifically, speaking from the experience of spending much of my life in a boarding school context, I really appreciated James’ candor and her vivid and detailed explanations of her experiences. There is much work to be done. One paragraph in James’ book really resonated with me, as it encapsulated for me the myth that permeates boarding schools:
  
  “We weren’t selling meeting attendees on the idea of being rich…but wealthy. Privileged. Well-rounded and we’ll-off. Their children would finally be on a level playing field with the children of executives, movie stars, politicians, and Mike-down-the-street—that one inexplicably well-off neighbor whose great-great-great-grandfather happened to have grabbed a homestead and enslaved three people in Missouri at some especially opportune time in 1843 and they’ve just been wealthy ever since, because America”
• 
  Hannah

  The quality of the writing in this book is quite poor; I found it bad enough to be distracting throughout the narrative.
  
  The narrative itself felt unfocused: is it the story of one girl’s experience at Taft? Is it a coming-of-age memoir? Is it the story of students of color at PWIs (predominantly white institutions)? Is it an anthropological and sociological examination of the history of racism at these schools? The book doesn’t know, and so it flails from one topic to another, leaving each feeling unfinished and unsatisfying.
  
  The ending was incredibly rushed; I was waiting for some sort of closure on the many relationships detailed in this book, and didn’t get any. The book ends just as the author is beginning to be able to speak about what her time at Taft was like, so the narrative feels circular, without moving forward in any particularly productive direction.
  
  Though not about racism, Notes on a Silencing by Lacy Crawford, which details a woman’s trauma at St Paul’s School—and the obscene reach of the school’s power in its effort to cover the whole thing up—is a wonderfully insightful examination of how schools like these (wealthy boarding schools designed for wealthy white students) abuse privilege and power to silence students, all for the sake of preserving reputation. I recommend that book for those interested in the “boarding schools are obscene” genre.
• 
  JBask

  An eye-opener into the casual racism of private institutions. I've pretty much always been opposed to boarding school situations, and I don't think anyone's gonna try to change my mind as more of these stories come out. Kenda James is a brave and beautiful soul to share her story with us. It's so important that we listen to our children (I know she's grown now, but I appreciate what a prolific writer she was as a teenager so she has a very clear lens for these stories), and that we friggin' learn from their experiences instead of forcing the same terrible experience on the next generation, and the next and the next.
  
  **I received a free copy of this book via a Goodreads giveaway**
• 
  Marie

  DNF at 70%. Was really trying to get through it but the second half just dragged on so much that I have to put it down. The story just isn’t put together well and while some anecdotes about her time at Taft were interesting, there weren’t enough to warrant a full memoir. This might have been better structured as a book of essays. She clearly has a lot of things to say about her situation and background, I’m just not sure this was the right way to do it.
• 
  Kristen Claiborn

  Boarding schools fascinate me. I feel it’s possible boarding schools fascinate many people, largely because none of us had the resources or opportunity to attend any of the elite boarding schools in the United States. Most of us don’t have the resources necessary for boarding schools to be considered, and most of us couldn’t imagine going to school in a place where we had to SLEEP, LIVE, and LEARN all in the same place. Nope, I appreciate that when my learning day was done, I got to go to a place that wasn’t associated with the learning. I had a home that was completely separate from where I went to school. However, like many educated humans, we understand that those who had the resources required to attend a boarding school had a bit of an upper hand in this game we call life.
  Kenda James, on more than one occasion, admits she had a certain level of privilege. That’s not the primary focus of this book, but it was one of those chips on my own shoulders when I started reading. I didn’t want to feel anything other than disdain for Kenda James, because she had this neat thing called opportunity that wasn’t available to us poverty-stricken kids wading through the mediocre trenches of public school. There was a section when she was describing her conversation with a college admissions counselor that stuck out for me. I was absolutely floored. This guy had knowledge of her interests and activities and was able to suggest schools that aligned with those. He also was able to determine she didn’t want to go to an all-girls school and didn’t want to go to a school that was close to home, though he did point out the benefits she might receive if she were to go there (it would Rutgers, imagine turning your nose up at Rutgers?). He was extremely knowledgeable about both her and the prospective colleges. When I sat down with a counselor to discuss college back when I was in high school, the message was pretty much: “don’t bother, you won’t get in.” While she was correct (I refused to take two years of a second language, I didn’t see the point…30 years later, I regret not taking Spanish), there was no effort put into ME. At all. She just looked over my grades and said it was unlikely I’d be successful in college. I did, in fact, go to college. I even graduated from college (Go Lobos), whereas many of my peers that had been touted as those who would be successful, never even tried. I wonder how my own life would have been different if I had had that one adult that believed in me, like this one admissions counselor believed in her.
  This shouldn’t be a huge surprise, but I’m a white girl. I have no knowledge of what it’s like to not be a while girl. Recent events have helped me realize that I also have privilege, simply because I was born a white girl. Reading this book was an eye opener for many reasons. The term “microaggression” wasn’t even on my radar prior to the “me-too” movement. Now, though, it’s all I can think about when I encounter misogyny on a daily basis. I smile, nod, and imagine I’m squishing heads rather than get outwardly angry. Kendra James had to deal with racism AND misogyny. There’s a section where James talks about the conversations that were had surrounding the college acceptances and rejections that made me want to hunt down her former classmates and put pins in their eyes. According to many of her classmates, the only reason any person got into any college is due to affirmation action. Kendra James had an outstanding academic record, she had great extras, and she was a phenomenal writer, allowing for what I assume were some great essays on applications. But some of her classmates decided her only claim to a good college was the color of her skin (my opinions on affirmative action are a very different conversation, best had with a bottle of tequila). It made me sick to my stomach. Her account of her time at this exclusive school shows that privilege can butt heads with racism. It was truly fascinating, and Kendra James is very good with words. I cannot possibly recommend this book enough.
  
• 
  Tibby (she/her)

  I really enjoyed this book. Like James I also went to a small independent school. While my school was not a boarding school and I am not Black, I found a lot of relatable issues and experiences in James' memoir. The money many of the kids at Taft had puts the wealth of the kids I went to school with to shame, but still, my classmates were the uber wealthy of the city where I grew up. I was not and did not live near them or move in the spaces they were typically in (after school activities, restaurants, hangouts, etc.). The bad behavior, the rules-don't-apply-to-me attitudes, and the entitlement was familiar, as was the administration's willingness to look the other way for certain students and not others.
  
  I think what I related most to was a phenomenon James calls "friends by circumstance", where in a school so small and being in some way very different from the majority of kids there you end up friends with people you might not have a lot in common with except that you have even less in common with other people. I felt this so strongly about the bulk of the people I was friends with in middle and high school and have thought about it a lot since then. They were not people I would have normally chosen to be friends with and once we were out of that particular place I lost all contact with them including forgetting some of their names and faces. That isn't to say that this can't happen in large, diverse schools because i'm sure it does, but it's a particular and inevitable experience in these strange places that are small independent schools.
  
  Also, after college James went into admissions work for small independent schools. I went back and worked for my school after college too. And I think both of us felt a strange tension about promoting a place we never felt particularly welcome in and had left with a bad taste in our mouths.
  
  I have also often thought back on the experience of the few kids of color in my middle & high school. James had over a 100 kids in her graduating class. I had 24. There were no Black kids in my class, although there was at least one in every other grade. We had a handful of Asian and latinx students too. I am sure they all had experiences like Kendra with casual racism of both other students and teachers. In some ways I would imagine the BIPOC kids in my school had a harder time. I was glad to get a perspective on what those classmates of mine might have experienced and it makes me wish I had been a better friend and classmate.