Sophie Gee

So there's a kind of underclass in American elite education that I think is more pronounced than in other systems of private education.

And there are these constant obvious and very subtle ways in which

the full fee payers and the underclass are being differentiated from one another.

And the thing that Sittenfeld chooses to make the flashpoint in this opening chapter is the fact that the poor black kid is stealing from the rich white kid.

and gets caught by the poor white kid.

So what we know about Little Washington is that she has a really unambivalent relationship to the wealth of the school.

And her relationship is basically, I'm not wealthy like that.

These people have totally unearned privilege.

There's no respect in which she would want it.

She has total disdain for them, actually, and their wealth.

And she determinedly wants to kind of keep herself as an outsider in this world.

And actually her stealing money from the wealthy kids, it's partly that they have money and she doesn't.

But it's also, I think, actually an expression of her sense that they are always going to be kind of

race and class enemies.

They can't come together.

It's her perception from, you know, as someone who's grown up poor and black, her perception that these fissures in American society can't be healed.

They can't come together.

Whereas actually Lee, the main character's sort of fantasy is that she can cross that line as a poor white girl or as a lower middle-class white girl, she can cross the line into the elite.

So they're talking about this girl called Gates Medkowski, who's the beautiful, wealthy senior prefect who's just got into Harvard.

And Lee says, what's Gates like?