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This is me trying and failing to explain race and hierarchy in the exclusive East Coast prep school where I was interned for 14 years to some people on live journal.

I went to an east coast prep school on scholarship. We had mandatory chapel three times a week.The racism was quieter and politer, but it was evident if you knew how to look. We had one black girl in my grade and a handful of black guys. Somehow, the black guys mostly had to date out of school because that one girl was the only one available. The Asian guys were SOL and poor Manoj (M. Knight Shamalan)... Yeah. He was the only subcontinental in my grade. The Jews mostly dated each other. Same with the handful of catholics.

(I was out of the dating pool, as I was off dating Public school guys with a veritable rainbow of ethnicities as I wanted nothing to do with all the entitlement and the attitude involved in dating the rich. Anyway, the only guys I would have deigned to date at my school were all gay. My theory was that they were less bastards than the run of the mill prep school guys because they had it so much harder. I liked the one openly bi-boy, but he was celibate on purpose the only year I was in a position to even think about it.)

Given that the guys used to complain about having no one willing to date them accept Kara, I think it was more explicit. I didn't explain this carefully enough, but the gentlemen of colour were routinely turned down my the white girls.

It was subtle, but pervasive. The brown and jewish students were included in large social events, but not allowed too close.

There was plenty of lip service to political correctness, but no real... understanding? Sympathy? There was a subtle pervasive sense that the non-WASP students were vaguely inferior. it was weakest in response to the catholics, though there too.

I'm not expressing this well, I know. It was hard to put your finger on as no one would say anything overtly racist, but it was an atmosphere of subtle exclusion one couldn't confront them directly about because they were to self aware to do anything obvious.

Don't start me on the old Boys Club subtle sexism either.

There was this strictly enforced, but invisible hierarchy going on, held in place with small rebuffs and quiet contempt. If you weren't the "right sort of person" you weren't quite a person. it was dehumanizing and impossible to fight. Urgh. I hated that place so much. It's impossible to properly explain to an outsider. One learned without meaning to how to read class in subtle differences of mannerism and intonation.

I vowed when I started teaching i would never teach in a private school and i never even applied to them.

I would rather deal with all those poor damaged kids, the periodic random violence, and overt racial ugliness 9usually between the Ukrainian and hispanic kids) any day in the wild soup of public school then deal with all that priveldge and entitlement and quiet cruelty that seems endemic to the private school atmosphere.