You had three minutes to get to class.
A hundred-eighty seconds to rush from room to room, always on the opposite sides of campus – do-able, as long as you didn’t have to fetch something from a locker or another spot. Do-able, if you could run fast, leap over crouching freshmen, and dodge slow-moving teachers. Do-able, as in the new book “Admissions” by Kendra James, if you didn’t have other frustrations to deal with.
For three years after college, Kendra James’ Saturday mornings were set: she spent them speaking to low-income parents and prospective students at a private high school on the upper east side of Manhattan, talking about the benefits of private school and the “golden tickets” that would pay for this opportunity. She spoke from experience: James had graduated from Taft, a private high school in Connecticut.
That had been a natural conclusion: after the school began accepting African Americans, James’ father was of the first Black graduates. This made James a legacy student, and she was used to being at Taft, she even knew some of the teachers.
Even so, private school was an adjustment. Making friends was difficult for James then, partly because she was a Black goth nerd who loved Harry Potter and Xena: Warrior Princess, and partly because she’d been raised with incorrect perceptions about other Black people. She didn’t know that rap music and intelligence could exist together, or how to “code switch.” It even took awhile for her to understand that not all insults were really insults.
By the beginning of her second year, her “mid” or sophomore year, James had a string of friends and plenty of confidence. Her nerdiness had a place at Taft, she’d learned to fit in, and she was mostly happy there with a new best friend and dreams of romance.
But there were things that bothered her, that she didn’t quite have the words for yet. There was quiet racism sometimes, and “microaggressions” that James absolutely noticed – just as she saw the racism in a huge, life-changing accusation for a crime she didn’t do…
Please don’t give “Admissions” an eye-roll. Author Kendra James concedes, many times and in many ways, that she knew then how privileged she was – an acknowledgment that sometimes appears as guilt. Still, she admits to familial wealth, social blindness, a life of ease, and that sometimes she didn’t know what she didn’t know.
The acceptance of that aside, this book is really quite fun: though she graduated not so long ago, reading James’ book is like stepping back in time to fumble with the combination on your locker between classes. It’s like wishing for an invite to the Cool Kids table in the lunchroom. It’s a love story to that perfect teacher, the ill-conceived “it’ll go on your permanent record” caper, and a BFF you never see again after graduation.
There’s an urgent message inside this book that’s essential reading for educators, but it’s also just plain enjoyable to have. Find “Admissions.” It’s a class act.
“Admissions: A Memoir of Surviving Boarding School” by Kendra James
c.2022, Grand Central Publishing
$29.00
304 pages
