Unpacking the price of life as a brown face among a sea of white ones is at the core of Admissions, Kendra James’s coming-of-age memoir about her time as a Black girl at boarding school
Photo: gorodenkoff/Getty Images/iStockphoto As a marginalized student, boarding school was supposed to be the opportunity of a lifetime for me: a world-class education, the space and resources of a small college, and a close-knit community all in one perfect package. That has always been the promise behind glossy photos of diverse, smiling teenagers and anodyne mission statements like “teaching the whole student” and “preparation for the active work of life.
This makes the thoughtless comments from classmates, hostile assumptions, dangerous allegations, and unrealized camaraderie across an invisible color line all the more shocking and painful. James’s bright and open prose, her accessible tone, the frequent jokes and references become counterweights to the hurt that cannot be hidden, reminders that she is just as scared and confused and overwhelmed as any teenager would be.
The isolation that James captures, the uneasy and unspoken cease-fire she negotiates with whiteness at Taft, becomes an echo of the experiences of so many other students of color at the same schools that make up the world of the American elite. She takes up our repressed feelings and gives voice to the untold tales of neglect and disregard, of camaraderie and solidarity and survival, of those of us who were brought into spaces without anyone considering how we would fit.
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