The Greatest Trick the Elite Ever Pulled

On Shamus Rahman Kahn's masterpiece "Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent Elite at St. Paul's School"

St. Paul’s commencement, 2024

In the fall of 1993 Shamus Rahman Khan, now a professor of sociology at Princeton, arrived as a freshman at St. Paul’s School in Concord, New Hampshire. The American-born son of immigrants from Ireland and Pakistan, Khan was a modest outlier at St. Paul’s. He’d grown up with money—Dad was a successful surgeon—but it was suburban professional money, and the family’s cultural capital was of the typical immigrant striver sort. They drove nice cars, ate at nice restaurants, lived in a nice house in a nice suburb of Boston. Shamus was a fully assimilated child of the American upper middle class, in other words, but he wasn’t native to a place like St. Paul’s, one of the wealthiest and most exclusive boarding schools in the United States, one of a select few New England prep schools—along with places like Groton, Andover, Exeter, and Deerfield—organized to educate those in possession not just of affluence but of the kind of social, cultural, and political capital that is able to shape and direct American systems of privilege and power. 

“I was unprepared for my new life,” writes Khan in his extraordinary 2012 book Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent Elite at St. Paul’s School. “...This school has long been home to the social elite of the nation. There were members of a national upper class that went well beyond the professional circles of my suburban home. Children with multiple homes who chartered planes for weekend international trips, came from family dynasties, and inherited unimaginable advantages met me on the school’s brick paths.”

In the introduction to the book, Kahn writes a bit more about his experience of the school as a student, and one gets the sense that a small number of his fellow students carried themselves with that air of smug entitlement that one would recognize from the many TV shows and movies in which preppy rich teens serve as villainous foils to outsider heroes who somehow end up in elite enclaves. This brand of popped collar snottiness is not the dominant vibe at St. Paul’s when Khan is a student there, but it still has some life in it. It’s wholly gone, however, by the time Khan returns to St. Paul’s more than a decade later, in the mid-to-late 2000s. By this point he is a doctoral student in sociology; he’s come back to his alma mater to spend a year teaching and living on campus while researching his dissertation on the school’s role as an incubator of the American elite.

The old culture of transparent elitism isn’t just thoroughly suppressed, Khan learns; it is suppressed by a new culture that specifically and definitionally rejects traditional forms of exclusivity. Khan writes:

Where elites of the past were entitled—building their worlds around the “right” breeding, connections, and culture—new elites develop privilege: a sense of self and a mode of interaction that advantages them. The old entitled elites constituted a class that worked to construct moats and walls around the resources that advantaged them. The new elite think of themselves as far more individualized, supposing that their position is a product of what they have done. They deemphasize refined tastes and “who you know” and instead highlight how you act in and approach the world. … What students cultivate is a sense of how to carry themselves, and at its core this practice of privilege is ease: feeling comfortable in just about any social situation. In classrooms they are asked to think about both Beowulf and Jaws. Outside the classroom they listen to classical music and hip-hop. Rather than mobilizing what we might think of as “elite knowledge” to mark themselves as distinct—epic poetry, fine art and music, classical learning—the new elite learn these and everything else. Embracing the open society, they display a kind of radical egalitarianism in their tastes.

What Khan means here by “privilege” overlaps with but is not identical with how the word has come to be used in the culture wars of the last decade. Having it does not mean, as “white privilege” or “male privilege” is usually taken to mean, that one moves through the world arrogantly, taking up more space than is fair, casually steamrolling the interests and voices of those with lesser privilege. It is, rather, that one with Khan’s version of privilege has acquired a set of skills and manners that allow him to move with ease in many different contexts, including those in which he’s interacting with people with less money, power, and privilege. It is not just the presumption that one belongs everywhere, but that presumption paired with the actual capacity to adapt well to an unusually broad range of environments. This could entail forthrightness and assertiveness in one context, if it’s a space where these qualities are respected and rewarded (the debate team, say). It could entail humility and deference when volunteering for a social justice group, knowing when to stay silent so that other voices can be centered. In class it might involve exhibiting just the right mix of diligence, humility and impishness. As captain of an athletic team, it could mean the exuding of a grounded authority. At a party with one’s friends it could be silliness and vulgarity. 

The goal is the fluid movement within hierarchies, and the recognition that hierarchies, properly perceived, “are not barriers that limit but ladders that allow for advancement. Learning to climb requires interacting with those above (and below) you in a very particular way: by creating intimacy without acting like you are an equal. This is a tricky interactive skill, pretending the hierarchy isn’t there but all the while respecting it.”

St. Paul’s, from this perspective, is a thickly organized hierarchical culture committed to, and justifying itself according to, a meritocratic egalitarian ideology. Nearly every minute of every day—in the dorms, in the classroom, at formal and informal meals, on the athletic fields, at dances, at office hours, etc.—students are forced to navigate as best they can a variety of shifting interactional and hierarchical domains. The more skilled they become in negotiating the various situations, the greater their social success and increase in status. When they arrive at St. Paul, the expectation—in some sense the requirement—is that they know almost nothing about how to do well in this new environment. One of the worst things new students can do, in fact, is presume to draw on pre-existing status, family connections or other overt repositories of unearned advantage to claim to already know how St. Paul’s works. If they don’t get this, if they don’t exhibit the necessary humility, they will get slapped down until they do.

Shamus Rahman Khan

Khan writes of a first year student, “Evan Williams,” who repeatedly tries to impress his fellow first years with the insider knowledge he has inherited from his older sister, a recent alum. He gets quickly and ruthlessly disciplined. “The phrase ‘Shut the fuck up, Williams’ was uttered in front of me and other faculty members on numerous occasions,” writes Khan. For Evan and every other student who violates the norm on claiming unearned privilege, there is a system in place: “a quick punch in the arm when no one was looking; flushing the toilets when they were in the shower, resulting in extremely hot water; the disappearance of your keyboard and mouse; or being ignored for a day—as if you weren’t there—only to be spoken to the next day without comment.” The teachers punish the older students if they catch them hazing noobs, but not so harshly that the disciplining stops.  

Insider knowledge is a precious currency at St. Paul’s, but you have to earn it—learning as you go, making lots of mistakes, distilling lessons from those mistakes, incrementally adapting to the hierarchies as you ascend through them. You learn how to get by, how not to embarrass yourself, how to earn the respect and affection of your teachers, how to make friends and acquire social status, how to follow, how to lead, when to quote Shakespeare, when to drop a Drake lyric, when to quote Martin Luther King, when to step forward, when to step back, when to be vulgar, when to be reverent, when to be aggressive, when to be deferential. 

Another way to describe this process, of course, is “growing up” or “becoming socialized,” but Khan’s point is that the advantage that one earns from going to a place like St. Paul’s is both the unusual density of the socialization—most local cultures in which adolescents are socialized are simply much shallower and less structured than St. Paul’s—and the precise ways the socialization fosters habits that serve one well within elite sectors of American life. The median American kid, for instance, isn’t spending nearly as much time as the St. Paul’s student is in close, intimate relationship to adults—teachers, coaches, dorm heads, etc.—acquiring the kind of facility in managing these relationships that is likely to accelerate one’s ascent up corporate and other professional hierarchies. They’re not regularly having formal dinners, as St. Paul’s kids are multiple times a week, and in the process becoming comfortable in, even bored by, formality and ritualized expectation. They’re not learning how to sit quietly in beautiful old cathedrals, how to move easily across an artfully landscaped New England campus, how to pop over to Manhattan for the opera, how to ask questions of world-famous politicians and artists in the context of a small seminar room, how to cultivate the right level of respectful familiarity with the serving staff in the dining hall, and how to talk about their extreme privilege with just the right blend of evasion, self-mockery, and acceptance. 

There are other cultures in American life that confront adolescents with a great deal of hierarchical complexity—orthodox religious communities, the military, maybe some well-established street gangs—but not too many of them, and none nearly as evolved to produce elite success. What kids are learning at St. Paul’s is both certain specific aspects of how to be properly upper class—what diction to use, how to style oneself, what mix of culture to have mastery over, how to justify one’s beliefs—and a way of being that conveys ease no matter the specifics. Both types of knowledge, Khan insists, are not merely or even primarily conceptual or factual. They are physical. They are bodily. They sink so bone deep in the kids that they cease even to be consciously knowable. Khan writes, for instance, about a “fight” between two boys on the hockey team after it comes out that one of them has been fooling around with the other’s sister:

“The brother, James, was very upset and arranged to meet Craig at one of the school fields to resolve the matter. James attempted to push Craig into a fight, shoving and shaking him. But Craig continually refused, keeping his hands down and repeating. ‘I’m not going to fight you.’ The encounter ended as James pushed Craig to the ground and walked away.”

On the surface, this outcome is the predictable result of the school’s zero tolerance policy for physical violence; the boys know what lines not to cross in order not to be too severely punished. But to stop the analysis there, argues Khan, is to miss how atypical it is that these young male hockey players, of all people, have the wherewithal to restrain themselves when caught up in the kind of sexual and familial conflict that in many cultures would lead to marriage or murder. That is not normal puckhead behavior, even in New England.

“We can’t ignore,” writes Khan, “the class elements of these boys’ self-control of physical strength and the realigning of power on a non-physical basis. … As one of the deans described the adoption of the no tolerance policy in the late 1990s, ‘When we started kicking boys out for hazing, they quickly learned. They’re not going to forget that for a long time. They’re not going to do it. And not just hazing. None of that physical macho bullshit.’ The dean’s disregard for such ‘bullshit’ exemplifies the St. Paul’s mentality—that violence is idiotic, counterproductive to elite success, and, though no one would ever say this, reeks of the lower classes” [emphasis mine].

These norms were absorbed so thoroughly that when it came time for Craig and James to do what hockey players do, which is throw punches when their honor or dominance is challenged, they not only abstained but did so without really thinking about it. They just did what they did, or rather didn’t, and will continue to not do as they move forward through life. 

It is important to Khan’s argument that these upper class norms are not fixed. At one point it was acceptable within elite spaces to demonstrate one’s capacity for physical violence; under the right circumstances it was even admirable. It didn’t code as lower class. But then it did, and so the norms shifted. The norms are shifting all the time, subtly and not-so-subtly. Khan has a funny story about how the school had to change its daily Chapel routine when they hired a few too many non-white teachers. 

“In the Chapel,” he writes, “faculty are seated on the basis of seniority. The image of almost all of the non-white faculty sitting in the back was too reminiscent of pre-civil rights era blacks sitting in the back of the bus. And so the school decided to abandon its hierarchical seating arrangement for faculty and students. When the hierarchy highlighted categorical distinctions that showed some of the oppressive and exclusionary properties of hierarchies, the school was no longer comfortable with the arrangement. … But after a couple of years—after these non-white faculty moved forward in their seats with seniority—the school again returned to its hierarchical arrangement. The hierarchy was reinstated once it no longer suggested that it was ascribed characteristics like race that mattered. As the non-white faculty moved up, the hierarchy could safely reappear, telling a story of progress and hard work (rather than reminding us of durable inequalities).”

What’s fixed, according to Khan, aren’t the means but the ends, which are the reproduction of privilege and power and the physically embodied capacity to effectively distinguish oneself from people lower down on the class ladder. When it comes to issues of both physiognomy and physical violence, Teddy Roosevelt was once the beau ideal. Now it’s Barack Obama. 

I wrote above that Privilege is an extraordinary book. People throw that word around too easily, but I really mean it in this case. It blew my mind in a way that it hadn’t been blown in a long while. Khan is a very good writer of sentences, an insightful theorist, and perhaps above all an observer of rare acuity. He just sees a lot more, and a lot more clearly, than most people would in a similar context, even if they went in with similarly ethnographic objectives. The result is a book packed with striking insight and fascinating detail. As it happens I went to a high school that wasn’t too different from St. Paul’s. It wasn’t as fancy, didn’t cater to quite as many sons and daughters of the high elite, but it was similar enough for me to vouch for Khan’s descriptions. They ring true. He captures with nuance what such places, which are so easy to caricature, are actually like. Khan has critiques of the place, and of the people who populate it. The students are too convinced of their own merit, their own exceptionality. The school is in denial, inevitably, about its role in a larger system of perpetuating inequality. Some of the rituals and traditions can shade into absurdity. But in so many ways it is a good place, and Khan makes no effort to obscure this. The kids are nurtured and loved and given the preparation they need to flourish. The teachers care deeply about teaching well and are committed to their students. The staff, including the people who do the dirtiest work—cleaning the dorms, washing the dishes, tending the grounds—are by and large happy to be there; they care about the kids and see themselves as part of an institution that has a purpose. 

“Many staff expressed to me the importance of the fact that they worked at a school,” writes Khan. “‘I used to work in this office,’ Cindy, a server in the cafeteria told me, ‘and the work was fine. It actually wasn’t that hard. And I even got paid more. But the job didn’t do anything for me but pay the rent. I like the kids here. I like seeing them, being part of their day. I can tell when they’re down and know how to make them smile. That makes it worth it. … Tom, who maintained the Chapel, won a million-dollar lottery when I was a student. Yet he kept his job. As he explained it, ‘I like working here. I like the kids. And I know how to take care of this place. It’s a big responsibility, but it’s important. … Sometimes it’s really hard and I think about quitting. But then something happens and I realize I’m a part of something.’”

Khan’s point, among many others, is that unequal systems often work precisely because they provide rewards to people at all levels of the system. These rewards can include esteem, security, physical safety and comfort, opportunities for connection, regular exposure to beauty and nature, a sense of collective purpose and pride, and the pleasure of participation in meaningful traditions and rituals. An institution like St. Paul’s wouldn’t work if the staff were too exploited or unhappy, or if the teachers were made to feel too sharply the sting of how much less money, power, and influence they have than the parents of their students, or than the students themselves are likely to have in the not too distant future. Seen through a Marxist lens, this can come to seem like something of a conspiracy: workers get shiny baubles and warm fuzzies to keep them distracted from their day-to-day exploitation and the space it occupies in larger systems of exploitation. Khan would likely assent to some version of this general analysis, but because his book is so grounded in the details of the school, and the feel of life on campus, it tells a more complex story. We are all embedded in systems of hierarchy. This is an inescapable fact of social existence. There are better and worse versions of hierarchy, on their own internal terms, and better and worse versions in terms of how they interact with other systems of influence and power in the larger society. Within the boundaries of its campus, St. Paul’s is a remarkably humane place. As parents, we would feel good about sending our kids there. As teachers, we would enjoy teaching there. As blue or pink collar workers, we would find it rewarding to work there. If we could scale up St. Paul’s to the level of a nation, it would be the most wonderful nation that has ever existed on Earth (or at least outside Scandanavia and Bhutan).

The problem, of course, is that it doesn’t scale. It’s far too resource intensive and far too exclusive. It is able to select for only those students, teachers, and staff who fit into its system, and then devote an immense amount of resources to the needs of those select populations. At best it is a testament to the human capacity to create very small communities that work exceptionally well. At worst, it is what sociologist

Musa al-Gharbi

, a former student of Khan’s, recently described as a “legitimation scheme … to launder wealth into perceptions of ‘merit.’” St. Paul’s in the 21st century is not simply what’s it always been, which is an extraordinarily exclusive, resource-rich enclave, but one that now disguises from itself its own true nature and purpose in order to enable the people who sustain its existence to continue perpetuating and in many cases exacerbating systems of economic, political, and social inequality with a blissful unawareness of what they’re doing. At least in the old days, one might say, they knew what they were about.

In the conclusion to Privilege, Khan makes some brief but thoughtful efforts to reckon with what this all means in terms of broader questions of inequality and justice. Is the new St. Paul’s, with its democratic ethos and practices, an improvement over the old St. Paul’s, with its moats and walls? Or is it worse because its class politics are so much less transparent, because its students’ immense and mostly unearned advantages are disguised by an ideology of merit? Is it emblematic of an advance in our nation’s capacity to live out its democratic ideals? Or is it a part of a big, long con that the upper classes are playing on the lower and middle? Khan’s answer is yes, to all of the above.

“Would I prefer today’s open yet obscuring elites to yesterday’s closed and more transparent ones?” writes Khan. “Certainly. The changes in spaces like St. Paul’s and its Ivy League counterparts have been profound and should leave any who value equality of opportunity optimistic. … [But] ours is a more diverse elite within a more unequal world. The result of our democratic inequality is that the production of privilege will continue to reproduce inequality while implying that ours is a just world; the weapons of the weak are removed, and the blame for inequality is placed on the shoulders of those whom our democratic promise has failed.”

Khan’s primary purpose with the book is to describe this new elite, not to devise a plan for its vanquishing, and on this front he does a brilliant job. If there’s a critique to be made of his characterization, it would be, perhaps, that he’s so thorough and interesting in his discussion of the “ease” these kids develop, internalize, and embody that you can lose sight of the ways in which he is describing an ideal rather than a median type. It’s easy to imagine, reading him, that St. Paul’s is taking in a bunch of schnoids at one end and pumping out legions of mini-George Clooneys and Rachel McAdamses out the other end, all of them charming, brilliant, charismatic, and self-deprecating in just the right proportions. This couldn’t be—and isn’t—right. I’ve moved amongst St. Paul’s grads and their ilk at certain points in my life, and although these ideal specimens exist among them, they are very rare. Most of the graduates of elite schools don’t sparkle. They’re more polished, on average, than the common man and woman. They partake of the platonic form of ease to a greater degree, and are more fluid in navigating hierarchies. They’re certainly more affluent and powerful than most of us. As individual personalities, however, they’re by and large the range of ways that people are: nerdy, painfully earnest, visibly neurotic, terribly fucked up, obnoxious, nice, cool, soft-spoken, and in general just not that remarkable. The system is not creating Clooneys out of whole cloth. If the exceptionally charismatic are more common in elite circles than in the gen pop, it is for a few rather unsurprising reasons. St. Paul’s is very good at polishing innate capacities and sanding off rough edges. It’s also quite good at selection. The most unpromising potential elite are filtered out, and the most promising are recruited and accepted, and therefore arrive at St. Paul’s with a great deal of polish in the bank. They are aristocrats already, as they always have been at St. Paul’s. The selection process is more open now than it was in the past, certainly, but the end result is if anything more potent in its capacity to perpetuate the class interests of the elite. Along with the scions of old school WASP aristocracy, they now bring in the scions of the Jewish aristocracy, the Texas aristocracy, and the Black aristocracy as well, and also a small but strategically essential population of mostly non-white working class and lower middle class kids who are there not because of pre-existing capital but because they are truly exceptional. These are the natural aristocrats—the Barack and Michelle Obamas—who legitimize the whole endeavor.¹ A system that finds, educates, and elevates these kids is one, surely, that deserves its exalted status and influence. 

“The weapons of the disadvantaged are in their numbers and their organization,” writes Khan in his conclusion. Although the numbers of the disadvantaged remain strong well into the 21st century, their capacity for organization, in Khan’s view, has been profoundly compromised by the new ideology of the elite and the systems it deploys to naturalize and therefore mystify this ideology. Organizing depends on a collective sense of injustice, and if it is hard to even see that the powerful have rigged the system to perpetuate their advantages, much less the mechanisms by which they’re doing it, then it becomes nearly impossible to organize effectively with others to exert countervailing power. It may even be worse than that. When this new, more democratic elite isn’t wrong-footing its class enemies, it is strip mining them of their organic leadership, drawing in the most talented and ambitious among them and setting them on the path to jobs at Goldman Sachs and the MacArthur Foundation or high positions in the Democratic and Republican parties. 

Khan doesn’t know what to do about this any more than I do, or you do. Toward the end of the book, he tells a story of walking across campus one morning and half-consciously noticing a group of students tossing pebbles. “I thought nothing of it,” he writes, “until it occurred to me that they were throwing them at one of the many sculptures on campus. ‘What are you doing?!’ I screamed at them. ‘That’s an Alexander Calder!’ They looked at me, somewhat shocked. They replied, ‘Oh, sorry,’ and turned in the other direction, throwing the rocks into the pond instead of at the sculpture.” We might dream of a better elite, one possessed not just of a democratic ethos but the historical, cultural, and political wisdom to anchor it in practices that spread wealth and power more widely. We might dream of an organized rise of the weak, a bottom-up movement capable of taking its share of wealth and power by nonviolent, democratic force. We might dream of many things, and wait in hope. Until then, we shall do what we can to make sure our own children end up on the right side of the cut. 

1.  “As long as at least some are attending because of their exceptional grit or talent,” writes Al-Gharbi, “the children of privilege who make up the majority of the student body can come to believe that they are at a school like Columbia because they are geniuses and scrappy bootstrappers, too—because those are apparently the type of people the university selects for.”