It also doesn’t help that James has been raised by “overachieving” parents (“Respectability Politics Black People”) who talk very little, if at all, with their daughter about race. Since childhood, she has sought out novels about boarding school, a subgenre with a history that predates the Harry Potter series, but these stories have little to do with the everyday lives of BIPOC students attending prep schools in the US. The young James enters Taft with heightened expectations. Gallagher, the playful teasing at the Black table in the dining hall. While her struggles may not come as a surprise, her observations are fresh and nuanced, layered into a remarkably detailed story that combines deeply felt memories about being an awkward “misfit” teenager with keen portraits of the people around her: the (mostly white) girls playing “two lies and a truth” on the field hockey bus, the students of color orientations led by the no-nonsense Mrs. This short-lived career prompts the adult James to reflect on the ways that, as a Black girl, she was simultaneously “hypervisible” and “unseen”-and to situate her own experiences within larger patterns. James graduated from Taft, attended Oberlin College, and subsequently spent a few years working in independent school admissions. In Admissions, James’s frank commentary and sense of humor provide a trenchant critique of a typical Catch-22: an elite institution wants diversity but doesn’t want order to be safe and welcoming for students of color. It wasn’t the academics that challenged her, but the microaggressions she and the other students of color experienced on a regular basis, the inconsistency with which certain school policies were applied, and the segregation that permeated Taft’s culture. The young James had visited the school during her father’s reunions, which gave her a sense of connection and familiarity, yet nothing prepared her-not her middle-class suburban life, her New Jersey public school education, or her upbringing by college-educated parents-for the ordeal of her three years at Taft. In the mid-2000s, Kendra James was the first African American legacy student at the Taft School, an upper-crust boarding school in Connecticut.
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