In recent years, the private educational institutions have opened up more to minorities and women, yet even though this trend has been expanding, the inequality in society has increased. Khan studies these parallel trends and struggles to determine how they could simultaneously exist. In order to do this he returns to St Paul’s where he attended high school and where he most acutely felt the affects of the inequalities within a meritocracy. Many of the students attending St. Paul’s came from families that were already wealthy, already held high positions in society and were simply hoping to pass this on to the next generation. “St. Paul’s helped transfer the birthright of each new group of students into credentials, relationships, and culture, all of which ensured their future success.” (Khan 13) St Paul’s however strives to have their student body represent the population of the world, with both the wealthiest and the poorest, female and male, and students of all races living together. Khan works to present the idea of a “‘new elite’ – a group of advantaged youths who don’t quite reflect what we typically imagine when we conjure up a vision of the well-off.” (Khan 16) These “new elite” are not all white or from rich families or live in picturesque houses in New England. Instead, this group is diverse, hard working, and believe that they can achieve upward mobility if they are determined enough to do so. Privilege is Shamus Khan’s attempt to understand and explain this new elite and to make sense of the ever-widening inequality that pervades American culture.
Looking at history, we can begin to understand the divide between title and wealth and the phenomenon of increasing inequality occurring simultaneously with increasing diversity. “…the Gilded Age elites became a distinct class, they removed themselves socially, culturally, and even spatially from their workers. Thus at the same time as the world became economically more open, other forms of social closure emerged.” (Khan 26) When Khan returns to St Paul’s as a faculty however, he is shocked to find that the sequestration he endured as a minority student no longer exists; instead, the divide is now between the students who attend the school based on birthright and those who were accepted based on hard work. They “believe that their place among the chosen few is something that has not been given to them but rather is something that they have earned.” (Khan 73) Thus the nature of the relationships between the students has changed dramatically as well.
There are clear boundaries between the students, staff and faculty. While the students often feel very connected to the custodial staff, they very rarely know anything about their lives. The staff serve as a support system to the students yet the relationship is most often quite one-sided. There is a sense of intimacy between the students and the faculty however, where the students often feel that their lives and ways of thinking were altered throughout their classes and credit their teachers with that accomplishment. These intense and influential experiences occurred for many of the students at St Paul’s and they “emerged from a set of dense, overlapping, and often contradictory relationships.” (Khan 68) The students learn the dynamics of complex interaction within these relationships and the “closeness” they feel with the faculty is often quite unique to the private boarding schools. Their authority is respected but the interactions between students and faculty strive to ignore the authority, to acknowledge the hierarchy but keep it invisible.
The students worked hard to avoid highlighting the distinctions between “them” and the rest of the world. “They instead consumed across cultural boundaries. They learned to absorb it all and to want to absorb it all.” (Khan 101) The students want to make the playing field as even as possible and to suggest that it is not the labels on the clothes you wear or the amount of money in your bank account that matter, instead it is the person behind all of this. However, we would be naïve to assume that appearances and social and class distinctions did not matter.
Separating the students he observes into social categories such as race and gender, Khan is better able to examine the performativity of privilege. Khan argues that race does in fact influence the interactions of students. He states that non-whites were seen as the experts on pop culture but that this expertise was demeaning. “In being seen as the legitimate and authentic carriers of popular culture, non-white’s were given power, but ironically such power cut against the expression of privilege.” (Khan 110) Another source of evidence of the racial divide at St Paul’s was the inability of many students to see past the differences in physical appearance of race. “While class distinctions may be able to ‘disappear’ or, better, be imagined away in interactions, race cannot.” (Khan 110) thus creating social separation as well. Social divisions also occurred due to gender, evident in that the girls must work harder than the boys on campus, and “having to work harder makes it harder for girls to display the requisite St. Paul’s ease.” (Khan 121) Privilege is a performance according to Khan, and gender, race and even the curriculum at St Paul’s drive the portrayal of this elite culture. The behavior of the elite at St Paul’s and at many private school systems is both defined and dependent upon the performance of the students in terms of reputation, wealth, culture, and above all, privilege. The only way that the elite or the poor are determined is in comparison to each other. “Elites are elites not because of who they are but because of who they are in relation to other social actors and institutions. Elites are made.” (Khan 205)