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. 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.

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. 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. Admissions: A Memoir of Surviving Boarding School Now 48 Off Get the book 29 at Macys Negro gallery, one of my friends snickered at lunch the next day when I broached the topic of To Kill a. That Black peopleor for that matter, any person of colorcould, and often did, adopt Black children. 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. 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. Kendra James, Admissions: A Memoir of Surviving Boarding School 1 likes Like These expensively educated children were, in that moment, learning brand-new information. 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. The best depiction of elite whiteness I’ve read.”- New York TimesĮarly on in Kendra James’ professional life, she began to feel like she was selling a lie.

The work of Admissions is laying down, with wit and care, the burden James assumed at 15, that she – or any Black student, or all Black students – would manage the failures of a racially illiterate community.

Kendra james admissions