Admissions
A Memoir of Surviving Boarding School
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4.1 • 17 Ratings
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
NAMED A BEST NONFICTION BOOK OF 2022 BY ESQUIRE
“[C]harming and surprising. . . 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. . . The best depiction of elite whiteness I’ve read.”—New York Times
A Most Anticipated Book by Vogue.com · Parade · Town & Country · Nylon ·New York Post · Lit Hub · BookRiot · Electric Literature · Glamour · Marie Claire · Publishers Weekly · Bustle · Fodor's Travel· Business Insider · Pop Sugar · InsideHook · SheReads
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this scintillating debut, former Shondaland editor James intertwines her own coming-of-age story with a searing indictment of elite academia. "To be Black in a New England boarding school," she writes, "is to be touted for your statistical presence... and ignored everywhere else." The first Black American legacy to graduate from Taft School in 2006, James recounts her rude awakening when the "freedom and independence" she was promised as a student turned out to be the opposite. Taft, she recalls, was a school both uniquely attuned to and openly hostile to her development and that of other "expert, if involuntary, pioneers" who were forced to navigate the constraints of an institution that catered to its "white majority." Notably, she recalls an unfounded accusation of theft by a classmate, that—after being threatened with police intervention—James was pressured to confess to. Despite the challenges she faced, James reflects on the paradoxical sense of safety she felt as a "Talented-Tenth-respectability-obsessed-snob" and how, after graduating, she worked as an independent school admissions counselor peddling the "myths of American upward mobility" to low-income families, before finally confronting her trauma and speaking out about the pervasive racism in boarding schools. The result is an eye-opening examination of race, class, and privilege in America.
