“I was the only black girl making white girl money,” she boasts, telling a vibrant story about sex and struggle in a bygone era.

The result is an often rambling narrative that, in (over-)recounting the minutiae of her everyday experiences, often drifts away from the pertinent race issues that are at the heart of her story.Ī well-intentioned but overdone memoir in need of streamlining.Ī former New York City dancer reflects on her zesty heyday in the 1970s.ĭiscovered on a Manhattan street in 2020 and introduced on Stanton’s Humans of New York Instagram page, Johnson, then 76, shares her dynamic history as a “fiercely independent” Black burlesque dancer who used the stage name Tanqueray and became a celebrated fixture in midtown adult theaters. Within a short time, however, she realized that her efforts to help other students of color amounted to selling “a lie for a living.” The author has a unique and timely story to tell, but her recollections of her years at Taft are detailed to a fault. Committed to diversity, James became a private school recruiter. Taft aggressively “preached diversity and inclusion and yet took money from Roger Ailes.” When a White student wrote an article in the school newspaper that students of color were the true racists for being “unfriendly, intimidating and granted too much special treatment,” the school did nothing. Where two students of color were expelled for copying from each other, a White male student who had plagiarized work was punished by being sent to the school’s Learning Center. The author also observed unequal treatment of her peers. During her first year, a White student not only accused an innocent James of stealing $20 from her room, but also threatened to call her uncle, who was a police officer.

The beautiful campus seemed to promise madcap Harry Potter–style adventures, but James soon realized that the majority-White school was really a “swamp of microaggressions” that threatened to engulf her at every turn. When James enrolled at the prestigious Taft School, she had no idea that, as Taft’s first “Black American legacy student to graduate since 1891,” she would become the school’s poster child for diversity. A founding editor of recounts her experiences as a student at an elite boarding school and, later, as an admissions officer specializing in diversity recruitment.

Admissions by Kendra James