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Admissions: A Memoir of Surviving Boarding School
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About This Book
Early on in Kendra James' professional life, she began to feel like she was selling a lie. As an admissions officer specializing in diversity recruitment for independent prep schools, she persuaded students and families to embark on the same perilous journey she herself had made—to attend cutthroat and largely white schools similar to The Taft School, where she had been the first African-American legacy student only a few years earlier. Her new job forced her to reflect on her own elite education experience, and to realize how disillusioned she had become with America's inequitable system. In ADMISSIONS, Kendra looks back at the three years she spent at Taft, chronicling clashes with her lily-white roommate, how she had to unlearn the respectability politics she'd been raised with, and the fall-out from a horrifying article in the student newspaper that accused Black and Latinx students of being responsible for segregation of campus. Through these stories, some troubling, others hilarious, she deconstructs the lies and half-truths she herself would later tell as an admissions professional, in addition to the myths about boarding schools perpetuated by popular culture. With its combination of incisive social critique and uproarious depictions of elite nonsense, ADMISSIONS will resonate with anyone who has ever been The Only One in a room, dealt with racial microaggressions, or even just suffered from an extreme case of homesickness.
Reviews
"James' generosity toward her younger self extends to everyone she writes about, even the classmates whose racism she describes."
"A well-intentioned but overdone memoir in need of streamlining."
"The result is an eye-opening examination of race, class, and privilege in America."
"James's reflection on her time at Taft and career as an admissions counselor reveals both the subtle microaggressions and outright racism toward Black students in a predominantly white school ..."
"James's gift in Admissions is to provide company for Black students in predominantly white spaces."
"She recounts anecdotes, some comical and some disturbing, about the predominately white student body and faculty ..."
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