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. 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. The best depiction of elite whiteness I've read.'- New York TimesĪ Most Anticipated Book by 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 SheReadsĮarly 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. A sharp-witted and deeply insightful look into the storied world of elite prep schools from the first African-American legacy student to graduate from The Taft School, shedding light from the inside, while giving voice to those on the outside, now in paperback.

Admissions kendra james book review