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Hannes Jandl's avatar

Lapham had cause and effect backwards when he talked about American elite schools. You can go to Exeter and Harvard and you still won’t truly be a member of the 1%. I know plenty of people from upper middle class families who went to Ivy League schools and are still just (barely) upper middle class. Even at a school like Yale the real elites tend to socialize amongst themselves and have their own internal secret societies and arcane sports like squash and polo to make sure no ambitious black woman will ever think she belongs. America’s elite schools have done an excellent job masking America’s real class system by letting a decent number of minorities think they were getting access to the elite world based on merit while the real elites hobknob elsewhere.

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Tom's avatar

Squash isn't exactly arcane.

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Hannes Jandl's avatar

Well, we certainly didn’t get a lot of opportunities to play squash in New Hampshire public schools.

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Tom's avatar
Apr 21Edited

India, Pakistan and East Asia it's everywhere. I played every weekend in public university in the US. It's not what I'd call an upper crust sport. If you read the book Evgenia is talking about in the post you'll see some really arcane or at least uncommon stuff like horse skills & riding, sailing, yachting, skulling, lacrosse, languages, and all sorts of stuff most of us have never done. It's that I don't think squash really falls into one of those only rich people categories like the others. It's basically racquetball with a little more strategy.

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Hannes Jandl's avatar

I suppose a lot of it depends where you come from. Lacrosse was not an uncommon sport where I grew up, we played a version of it at recess in middle school. A lot of middle class people learned to sail on the lake, and you didn't need that much money to ski or snowboard. But no one played squash, there just weren't any courts nearby, so it always seemed like a prep school sport to me.

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