I remember halting as I started to speak. I was sitting in a circle of friends in the spot we’d claimed on the first floor of our newly renovated school library, which was named after some dead eugenicist’s even deader father. There was irony in this; we were a diverse collection of people. Our freshman year, a white boy in our grade had collectively nicknamed us “The Whole Enchilada,” and admissions photographers loved that they could find Black, Latine, and Asian kids in the same place. We were socioeconomically diverse, too—ranging from wealthy to lower middle class. I was near the bottom of that social ladder, but still, I hoped that my friend group’s diversity had made them open-minded enough to understand what I was going to say.

The night before, I’d arrived home late from my nightly commute—unlike most of my friends, I was a day student. I swiped through my friends’ private Snapchat stories—which were uncharacteristically busy for a weeknight—and realized that I was missing perhaps the most entertaining event of my junior year. The administration was carrying out a massive drug search of the majority of dorms on campus. In horrified awe, my friends reported the cartoonish lengths that our classmates went to protect themselves—for instance, one kid allegedly threw his vape cartridges out of his bedroom window as a dean walked by. More fascinating was how people covered for each other; day students were instrumental in this. Unlike boarders, who were constantly surveilled by house counselors, day students had the luxury of privacy and mobility. We could simply leave campus of our own accord, while boarders had to obtain faculty permission to leave town. That night, then, day students hid their illicit substances in their cars, where the administration couldn’t search, or simply strolled out of the library with their pockets weighed down by boarders’ drug paraphernalia. 

Despite its scrambling chaos, this camaraderie was tender and inspirational. The way that students looked out for one another was a signal of campus unity that none of us had seen before (especially after the pandemic had scattered us hundreds of miles away from one another for several months…I’ll spare you the details). That day though, students’ collective agreement that banning a kid from their own graduation for owning a vape pen was unfair drove them, in turn, to collective protection.

I admired their selflessness. More than that, I envied their courage, because I was afraid to do as they’d done.

It wasn’t just that I was a student of color (I’m Afro-Latina, so that’s already a racial double whammy) on full financial aid, an intersectional identity that would surely heighten my chances of facing harsh disciplinary action. No, at the core of my fear was the relationship between my hometown and the wealthy, predominantly white suburb that my high school was nestled in.

I grew up in a low-income post-industrial city with a high Latine population. It was regionally notorious for its drug market and high crime and poverty rates. Our public school system wasn’t strong, so my parents put me in Catholic school through eighth grade. Come eighth grade, I was expected to apply to a local Catholic—or otherwise private—high school in the area, which ultimately led me to an independent secular high school that was far more elite than I could conceptualize.

In my new school, I did anticipate discrimination based on my hometown, especially in relation to drugs. In local media, my city was positioned as the supplier of narcotics to the surrounding suburbs. In local papers, state news, and a speech by then–presidential candidate Donald J. Trump, we were imagined as a cesspool full of immigrants and their criminal offspring that got innocent white kids hooked on heroin. Fortunately, at my high school, sentiments informed by racism, xenophobia, or classism were mostly reduced to the awkward stretch of silence that followed my turn to name my hometown during class introductions. More blatant occasions were rare, like the time my bio classmate winced and said (quite tactfully, I might add) “That’s bad,” when I mentioned where I was from.

Otherwise, I could mostly forget about the stigma that my city carried. There’s an odd numbing effect that boarding school can have. When your financial aid office gives you a weekly stipend, a free MacBook, and funding for any supplies you might need; when you, a kid accustomed to a school building with hazardously malfunctional radiators and no gymnasium, are given similar access to the bastion of resources that an elite institution provides your wealthy white classmates; you get lulled by the privilege you gain. Your family may have to save up to take trips to their home country while your classmates can easily hop to Mykonos for spring break, and your middle school may have not have offered algebra while your classmates had already taken trigonometry by eighth grade, but now that you’re all here, the gap between you and most of your peers seems to have shrunken. Extracted from your respective contexts and dumped onto a 250-year-old campus, you seem to forget the differences between yourselves as the Ivory Tower’s cozy, all-inclusive blanket of privilege shelters everyone.

But other days, you get shocked back into reality when you see the staggering balance in your friend’s bank account, or when certain people get tailed by employees at CVS, or when your chem lab partner (who has a lower grade than you) treats you like an idiot. Or when the day students (who are from the aforementioned suburb) feel bold enough to stride out of the library carrying illicit substances or to hide contraband in their cars, while you’re at home, simultaneously admiring their camaraderie and imagining a scenarios that could ruin your life—if your friend’s vape pen fell out of your backpack, for instance, and you were unceremoniously expelled; or if you drove home with your friend’s weed and just so happened to get pulled over by a cop.

I didn’t want to do what a brave person would. But I didn’t want to be a bad friend, either; I didn’t want my friends to believe I’d be there to cover for them when I was too scared to. So the next day, in the eugenicist’s dad’s library, I explained to my diversity-photograph friend group that I simply had too much to lose. And it wasn’t just me at risk: it was the reputation of the kids from my community who wanted to attend my high school (we were already so scarce in the student body), and that of all the youth in my city. So my friends couldn’t count on me to protect them if another drug search happened. And I didn’t say it aloud, but I hoped it’d be implied: I can’t be labeled another inner city drug trafficker. Ask your rich white friends instead.

Most of my friends understood, or seemed to. Some looked disappointed, but they didn’t question me. But one spoke up with a sad sense of betrayal: “You wouldn’t do it for your friends?”

I didn’t know how to explain it to her. She was wealthy, and she wasn’t an underrepresented minority, so she wouldn’t be criminalized the way I might be. She had so many safety nets that I probably would never have. So I stammered something more about how high the risk was, my community’s reputation, about the threat of the cops. She was a leftist, and this was post-2020, so that was enough to make the conversation fizzle out. 

But I still don’t think she understood. If the night before had reminded me of my lack of leeway, that conversation in the library showed me how easily some people overlooked the gaps in privilege that the Ivory Tower’s blanket so often obscured. To this day, I’m itched by a question that my peers didn’t even seem aware of: what sense did it make for me to protect my boarder friends with my privacy and mobility if their relative lack of criminalization, racial privilege, or wealth already protected them? Why would I take on their risk if my consequences were already so much sharper?

Maybe compassion, selflessness, and courage are supposed to drive me to overcome those fears. Theoretically, I’d agree that we’re all supposed to use our scraps of privilege to aid one another until we make the world just. And I’m sure that there’s plenty of marginalized people out there who are brave enough to take the risks that I didn’t. But, for the sake of my community—and perhaps more than I want to admit, for my own sake—I’m not that brave. You can call me a coward, but if I’d gotten caught on a day like that, I could’ve been called much, much worse.