Admissions Quotes

“There is a balance Black parents are continuously working at, I think, trying to find the proper amount of awareness and hesitance to instill in their children. Enough to keep them safe, but not enough to prevent them from wanting to experience the world as fully as their white peers might. It evolves over time, family by family, but no one has the right answer.”
― Kendra James, Admissions: A Memoir of Surviving Boarding School

“I knew my parents would believe the school and Rachel. First of all, I didn’t really talk to them about feelings. Anything much beyond “I like this,” “I don’t like that,” and “oh my God, I hate you, leave me alone!” went in my journal, where emotions could be laid bare and punctuated by something other than the slamming of my bedroom door.”
― Kendra James, Admissions: A Memoir of Surviving Boarding School

“If Taft did nothing else, it taught me, for better or worse, how to thoroughly explore and integrate myself within a new community. I learned that there was no need to be nervous about introducing yourself to someone new when picking up a local library card; I started to figure out what it meant to be a “regular” at a writing spot—it was only Starbucks, but they knew my name and order and that felt good. Whether we were wandering the streets adjacent to the city mall, randomly getting off the bus in the middle of Waterbury “just to see” what a beef patty tasted like from one corner store versus another, or walking through cemeteries and the backyards of Watertown homeowners, I enjoyed pushing the boundaries of the independence being at Taft afforded me.”
― Kendra James, Admissions: A Memoir of Surviving Boarding School

“It was one of those days that made one understand why parents paid such a premium for their children to spend four years on this campus. The temperature sat somewhere in the fifties, but the sun was shining and reflecting perfectly off the pond in the middle of campus. Each redbrick building radiated a near-golden-hour glow, a rose-colored tint that would eventually shade every memory of Taft I shared with the parents of prospective independent school students later on in my career.”
― Kendra James, Admissions: A Memoir of Surviving Boarding School

“Yara knew how to work a teacher over, kneading them with her words until they agreed to do what she wanted.”
― Kendra James, Admissions: A Memoir of Surviving Boarding School

“These expensively educated children were, in that moment, learning brand-new information. That Black people—or for that matter, any person of color—could, and often did, adopt Black children. It was just clicking that orphaned or fostered Black babies weren’t just accessories for celebrities and nice white ladies from Utah who needed some color to spice up the extensive and expensive scrapbooking habit that they absolutely have 100 percent under control.”
― Kendra James, Admissions: A Memoir of Surviving Boarding School

“White effort never gets to the foundation of the problem itself, because that would require acknowledging that the foundation of whiteness is the problem and that, in turn, might hurt the endowment.”
― Kendra James, Admissions: A Memoir of Surviving Boarding School

“It was just us, ten children sitting in a room, surrounded by whiteness on all sides, attempting to solve the racism of a 115-year-old institution.”
― Kendra James, Admissions: A Memoir of Surviving Boarding School

“Like many Black people, the life I dreamed of was paid for with the American currency of a minor trauma.”
― Kendra James, Admissions: A Memoir of Surviving Boarding School