The emotional climax of James’ memoir is a devastating chapter on the aftermath of an op-ed in the school paper written by a white student, who accuses minority students of being “the real segregationists” on campus. Of that first orientation, she writes, “No one was saying the words ‘race,’ ‘privilege,’ ‘Black,’ ‘Latinx,’ or ‘white’ aloud I wasn’t yet at the point where I thought I needed to ask why being not white at Taft in 2003 would be such a big deal.” (If those subjects aren’t discussed explicitly at a meeting for students of color, she adds elsewhere in the book, you can imagine how often the school broached it with the white kids: exactly once a year, during Black History Month.) Ultimately, she seems less interested in indicting them than in thinking about the system of exclusive education that has encouraged their myopia about race and class - about any lives markedly different from their own- to flourish unchecked.
James’ generosity toward her younger self extends to everyone she writes about, even the classmates whose racism she describes. James was, she writes, “the first Black American legacy student to graduate from The Taft School” since it started admitting Black students less than 50 years earlier.īooks How an acclaimed author decided to write fiction for Black women like herĭeesha Philyaw talks about the long gestation of her collection ‘The Secret Lives of Church Ladies,’ a Times Book Prize finalist for first fiction. Her father was an alum, and he had frequently brought the family to campus for visits. James attended the Taft School in Watertown, Conn., from her sophomore year of high school, beginning in 2003, until she graduated in 2006. But it doubles as an announcement that James is taking us into the kind of clubby, insular culture where familiar-sounding words have been repurposed as a code intelligible only to a privileged few. That choice might seem strange for a contemporary story set in the suburbs of Connecticut - not a place the average American reader would expect to need a translator. Kendra James’ debut, “ Admissions: A Memoir of Surviving Boarding School,” begins with a glossary. Two new books eviscerate that concept, examining from very different angles the warping effect that predominantly white institutions can have on young Black women. The myth of colorblindness contends that anyone can thrive in America: All we need to do is give underserved groups access to existing structures of power and the rest will work itself out.
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