American Privilege: The One Percent, Myself Included

Reckoning with the old-money world that made me

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In the first spring of the pandemic, I worked a few shifts at a hospital in Brooklyn. The governor had asked on television that health-care workers volunteer, and tens of thousands did. I was surely among the least qualified—an EMT on paper, I had ’til then logged a total of 12 hours, a single overnight ambulance rotation amid the bars and projects of Manhattan’s Lower East Side. The hospital human-resources administrator noted my inexperience and asked if I was willing to work in the morgue. That’s where they could really use the help, she explained. I had been looking forward to treating the living, but on quick reflection supposed the dead were more commensurate with my level of experience and agreed to go wherever she thought best.

The work consisted of bagging, moving, tagging, and inventorying corpses. The main problem, for me, was goggles. Mine fogged up. We were advised, however, not to touch our goggles once we had them on, lest we bring the virus from our hands to our faces. And so, as the first shift progressed, rather than adjust my goggles, I tilted my chin ever higher into the air, peering down my nose through a shrinking unfogged window. It was difficult to see what I was doing, and, in order to identify names Sharpied onto tags and bags, I had to bring my face right up close—which, of course, was the last thing I wanted to do.

The rest of my colleagues fared little better, eye-protection-wise—their flimsy plastic face shields tended to skew and fall off. Bare-eyed, we felt an urgent desire to finish, because the longer we spent among the dead, the more likely, it seemed to us, we were to contract the virus that had killed all of these people. In our hurry, we may have once misplaced a body, or rather, mislabeled one. But by the time we realized that the paperwork didn’t make sense, that the count might be off, we had been in the trailer a long time. One of the bags had ripped; evil-looking fluids dripped and pooled on the floor. A look passed among us. Probably it was fine. Time to get out.

When I volunteered, I thought I might collect such incidents and turn them into a book about life in that hospital, a kind of practitioner’s memoir. But by my fourth shift, it seemed to me that, to do so properly, I would have to work there for years—to become, however much I could, a member of the community, which was majority Black and Latino and not wealthy—and I was not prepared to do so. Moreover, I wondered whether, even if I did stay for years, I could write about this community well or usefully, as I was of a different race and economic class, an outsider.

I was, in a sense, a professional outsider. For more than a decade I’d reported and written about Iraqis and Afghans caught in the American wars. But recently I’d stopped, no longer thinking myself an appropriate person to tell their stories. I had been wrestling with the idea that I ought to pursue some kind of intrinsically useful work, like EMT-ing, and leave people who suffered injustice to write their own stories. Because, rather than experiencing injustice, I had in many ways been its beneficiary. As a volunteer in the hospital, I didn’t dwell on this fact. As a writer, however, matters were more complicated. Even if I was volunteering in the morgue, I was also there, partly, to write. Was I then a tourist—or worse, a kind of profiteer?

As the pandemic ebbed in New York, a summer of protests began. The protesters demanded that America reckon with its history of racial and economic injustice, and I marched sometimes, too. I wondered, though, if I had reckoned sufficiently with myself—or, perhaps more important, with the community that had produced me, which was so very far removed from that hospital and those protests. It seemed a good time to take a look at where I’d come from. I decided to stop the hospital work and just write. But rather than write about injustice as experienced by those people who bore its brunt, I would attend to my own people. I would write about the one percent, among whom I had been raised.

The opulence of New York City is famous. Countless articles, novels, films, and social-media feeds are dedicated to the markers of American oligarchy. Some examples of the genre, such as The Great Gatsby, are staples of public education. The wealth is not a secret, nor the violent decadence. I remember a schoolmate who bragged about defecating in bed so the maid would have to clean it up.

Our school was called Buckley. It had a reputation for rigor, conservatism, old wealth, and athletic dominance over the dozen or so other “top tier” private schools in the city. All sat in a highly developed hierarchy. “Chapin girls marry doctors; Brearley girls become doctors; Spence girls have affairs with doctors,” went one well-known saying. Still, the schools had more in common than not, and if a child attended any one of them, he’d be well prepared to achieve, maintain, and perhaps surpass his parents’ position in society. This preparation was accomplished as much by what was not taught as what was.

From the April 2021 issue: Private schools have become truly obscene

At Buckley, for example, we had Quiet Street. It began with a turn we’d make on the charter buses—not yellow school buses—that we rode out to our playing fields most weekdays of the fall and spring. A right turn onto 124th Street in East Harlem. As we turned, one of the coaches—“sport-sirs,” we called them—would announce: “Quiet street!” and that bus, full of white adolescent boys, fell silent. No whacking of shoulder pads or lacrosse sticks, no trash talk, no jokes, no whispers, no pantomimes. Long before, some boy had called a racial epithet out the window, and a Black pedestrian, in response, had thrown something at the bus.

Or so I heard, long after I graduated. As a student, I never learned the details of the story. It was not widely or formally discussed. No one ever explained, and few asked. I knew only that to speak on Quiet Street was forbidden. In 10 years at the school, on nearly a thousand bus trips, I remember none of my peers breaking the rule. Such was its mysterious power.

What was going on? I recently asked some of my old classmates. All remembered Quiet Street, and some vague version of the origin story above. One said this: “Seems kind of silly, and also, I don’t know, vaguely racist, maybe? You’re basically like, ‘If we’re not quiet on this street then the horrible people who live here are going to jump us,’ you know what I mean? … Maybe not even vaguely racist. Maybe overtly?”

Quiet Street was the manifestation of a culture that preferred silence to discussion of race and class. These issues could not be discussed without raising questions that might undermine, even reveal as hollow, the school’s motto: Honor et Veritas, or “Honor and Truth.” But the nation’s inequalities and injustices were so obvious and incendiary that they could not credibly be ignored. And so Quiet Street both acknowledged and elided the violence of society through memorial silence.

That first summer of the pandemic, I received a school-community-wide email from Buckley’s headmaster, emphasizing the importance of diversity and explaining steps taken in response to the murder of George Floyd. In my own eighth-grade class, 30 students were white and three were people of color—of Chinese, Filipino, and Guyanese descent. Today, according to the school, 34 percent of families self-report having a nonwhite parent. Other things have changed too. The Lord’s Prayer rotates with prayers from other religions at Friday assembly. The school closes for Jewish holidays. As of 2001, female faculty have been permitted to wear pants, rather than only dresses or skirts, to work. And though no one is quite sure when it ended, Quiet Street, I am told, no longer exists.

Officially, it never did. There were a lot of powerful, off-the-books rules like that, so powerful that they didn’t even seem like rules. They seemed almost like physical laws, like gravity—norms, a social scientist might call them—and they governed our lives long after we left Quiet Street and on-ramped to the Triborough Bridge, as it was then known. Thereafter, we filled the bus again with noise and crossed the Harlem River to our playing fields on Randall’s Island. These happened to look out on another island: Rikers—a prison complex, where, of some 6,000 inmates, about 90 percent are Black or Latino.

Children at schools like Buckley almost never ended up anywhere like Rikers Island. They could, for fun, kick garbage cans into traffic on Park Avenue in the velvet dusk of a spring weekday and suffer no consequences. They could be arrested for, say, vandalism and underage intoxication, mouth off to the arresting officer—“Yeah, I got a bazooka in my pocket”—and be released without charge from the local precinct into the care of a teenage sibling. Passing into adolescence, many such children developed a sense of invincibility. This is common enough among adolescents but lasted, for some of the people I grew up with, deep into adulthood.

The shock, rage, and chagrin expressed by the rare one-percenter sent to prison were genuine. They were genuinely surprised that the world did not bend to their will as it had since childhood. One schoolmate of mine, convicted of murder despite his insanity plea, wrote a letter to the Manhattan district attorney noting that, like him, he was “a graduate of Buckley”—as though this were a basis on which to begin clearing up the charge. The connection usually didn’t have to be mentioned, and especially not in writing. On the off chance that no mutual friend existed to make a necessary introduction, there were other ways to signal membership in the tribe. The handshake, for example. Teachers manned the door each morning and might deny a student entry until he had shaken hands and voiced a greeting to the teacher’s satisfaction.

“Good morning, sir.” Firm grip, direct eye contact, tie knotted, 10 years old.

“Good morning, Mr. McDonell.”’

The best manners teach empathy. We learned some, and mostly grew into kind men. This did not mean we grew into good men. But kindness, interpersonally, was easy because, generally, everyone was kind to us. Though all families are worlds unto themselves, we were universally spared the societal traumas of racism, poverty, state violence. We never even had to wait in line, really. We were handled with silk gloves at the Knickerbocker Cotillion dance classes. Our world was gentle, and so, though there was some bullying, we were usually gentle with one another.

Read: Checking privilege checking

Really we were blinkered, even as our chivalrous good manners were explicitly connected to the Gospel of Luke—“to whom much is given, much is expected,” as quoted by Christopher Wray, the director of the FBI and a Buckley boy, at a recent graduation. We were expected to excel, to give back, to serve.

But to serve whom? The only people we knew outside the Bubble were the people who served us. We were not boarding with the rest of the passengers. And consider that, if he failed the handshake test, a student was not allowed into the building. He was sent around the block, perhaps in the snow—as I was, January 1996, penny loafers soaked. What, then, was a child to make of someone who didn’t know—who was never taught—the proper way to shake hands? Should they be let in out of the snow?

There is a violence to good manners. A thank-you note, standing up when a woman enters the room, holding the door—we learned soon enough that these thoughtful practices could also be pieces of armor, or tools that might allow you to, say, get your younger brother out of the precinct without a problem. It was not, of course, using the word sir that did it. It was what loomed behind a white 16-year-old in an Armani tie—power. In certain contexts, a properly executed handshake sent a message not unlike a snake’s rattle.

The handshake was the most basic tool. I heard parents put it this way: “I wanted to raise them so that they knew how to do everything.” And by college, it must be said, the level of competence was sometimes very high. Twenty-year-olds who could, variously, sail long distances, play the piano, read Latin and Greek, speak French and Mandarin. They could play all the games: tennis, football, racquets, chess, backgammon, bridge. They could confidently deliver a eulogy, a toast, a speech on nearly any matter of the day, and were excellent drivers and even, very occasionally, pilots. They were familiar with pistols, rifles, shotguns, dog training, falconry, cigars, horses and horsemanship, wines, cocktails, tax strategy for the estate and individual, the real-estate market and how to access it in several cities (both American and European), art history, how to ask a favor from a chief of staff. And on and on. World-class pimple popping, masturbation, and video gaming too.

Such skills arose not from any extraordinary talent or discipline but from the enormous resources invested in each child. And though I have here emphasized traditionally highbrow skills, we were groomed to be comfortable at every level of culture, in every room—to appreciate Taylor Swift as well as Tchaikovsky, to make small talk with the custodian as well as the senator. The deeper lessons were confidence, poise in any context—what the sociologist Shamus Rahman Khan calls “ease.” Old-fashioned exclusionary markers could, in fact, be a liability, in the same way an all-white classroom was. All the world was ours not because of what we excluded or inherited but because of our open-minded good manners and how hard we worked—which, all agreed, was very hard indeed. This superficial meritocracy masked, especially to ourselves, a profound entitlement.

Our summer holidays were longer than the public schools’, and many of us left the city every June. But our education did not stop; it only shifted focus. From ages 6 to 14, for example, June through August, I attended the Junior Yacht program at the Devon Yacht Club in Amagansett, New York. The lessons were in skill, but also—perhaps more so—in taste. Sailing was but one of many pleasures imprinted on our psyches in those summers, so deeply as to become beloved, essential pastimes that some of us would feel compelled to maintain for the rest of our lives.

The planks of the dock were warm under our feet and the day was divided: sailing, swimming, tennis, and lunch—arts and crafts only if it rained. To swim, we walked out along the pier over seagull guano and the dried shells of spider crabs, dove off, swam laps back and forth to the pilings where the cormorants sat. On the clubhouse deck, grandmothers watched, ate Caesar salad, patted their lips with crisp white napkins, and planned to see one another again at Family Night. This was every Thursday of the summer. The club put out a buffet and hired a band. You had to wear a jacket and tie, and the rule was enforced. If you arrived without, the maître d’ provided a faded spare.

No money was ever exchanged at the club, no credit card ever seen. Everything was included in annual fees or charged after. At Family Night, or at lunch, or in the snack bar, you provided your member number: M-361, in my case. Then you’d fill out a chit with a small pencil, marking the grilled cheese or milkshake or burger or cheese fries that you wanted. Marina staff, kitchen staff, and waitstaff all wore uniforms, white and blue, vaguely nautical, and were largely from Ireland. I don’t remember ever seeing groundskeepers, but the club was immaculate from the gravel to the dune grass to the clay tennis courts to the White Room. That was the name, I can’t remember whether officially or not, of the lounge/bar in which every piece of furniture was white—like almost every person I ever saw at the club.

And every Fourth of July, fireworks. These were organized by George Plimpton, a longtime member, prominent writer and editor, and close friend of my parents. George was an honorary New York City fireworks commissioner and wore the title with some pride. For the Devon display he enlisted a famous fireworks family whose factory, one tragic year, had exploded “up island.” George once brought a troupe of circus performers—trapeze artists and little people—to the club, and this was chuckled over. I can’t remember where I heard all that, or rather, overheard it—it was part of the ambient grown-up noise. George also once looked directly into my eyes and told me: Just as I was looking into his eyes, he had looked into the eyes of a man who had seen Pickett’s Charge—the culminating action at the Battle of Gettysburg. This made me feel connected to something secret, old, and important—another club inside the club.

Quiet Street ran straight through Harvard. I applied early and was accepted. My new friends skewed foreign and midwestern and not so rich, but I remained close to some one-percenters, and aware of many. They made up about 20 percent of the student body.

In many ways, the one percent experienced Harvard like everyone else. Everyone had to take the “core curriculum”—a class each in quantitative reasoning, literature, and several other fundamental disciplines. For moral reasoning, I took a class, still taught, called “If There Is No God, All Is Permitted,” in wood-paneled Sanders Theatre. Everyone lived in Harvard Yard as freshmen, was invited to tea at 18th-century clapboard faculty houses, endured the snowy Cambridge winters, used the same libraries.

The richest and best-connected students, nonetheless, had a different college experience. The starkest symbols of the difference were the “final clubs.” These eight social organizations were all-male, dated from the 18th and 19th centuries, and owned clubhouses off campus. But the off-campus/on-campus line was very thin. The mascot of the most exclusive club—a pig—was carved into one of the stone arches above an entrance to Harvard Yard. I was “punched” by that one, the Porcellian, possibly at the request of George, who was himself a member. I attended two “punch” events, essentially social auditions.

Read: Still white, still male–the anachronism of Harvard’s final clubs

The first was held near Harvard Yard in a large townhouse. Sophomores tried to make good impressions on juniors and seniors, all in coats and ties, all drinking from an open bar. You could feel the tension, how high the stakes were for some, in every exchange of Oh yeah, I went to Hotchkiss with his brother!

On a cold Sunday morning a few weeks later, a chartered bus brought us—the survivors of that first event—to a rolling estate somewhere outside Boston. Uniformed waiters served Bloody Marys off silver trays during a steak brunch. I didn’t enjoy the touch-football game, kept to myself, charmed no one, and wasn’t invited to a third event. Years later, a member of the club—son of a cop, scholarship student, an exception—told me that I “didn’t seem like [I] wanted to be there.”

He was partly right. I never intended to join. But at Harvard, just like at Buckley, much of my education happened off campus anyway. I spent one formative holiday in the Galápagos Islands on a boat chartered by an oil family that liked to talk politics. The patriarch told me over his tequila on the aft deck, “I don’t trust any government that doesn’t trust me to have whatever kind of weapon I want.” The logic was more convincing on his boat. Snorkeling with his children, I saw penguins shoot past like minor but ancient gods, terns dive down through clear water, streaks of bubbles racing heavenward. The water was silver with fish; so many seabirds were diving at once that we were swimming in a froth. Above, frigate birds attacked and robbed one another in midair.

And everywhere we went on the islands, as guides explained the rare wildlife, the patriarch joked, “Hmm, that looks tasty—turtle soup!” Or, “A little blue-footed booby fricassee?” And so on. Toward the trip’s end, he said that he was in fact interested in hunting on the Galápagos Islands, and how could we make that happen?

Such were the people in the Bubble. And if, here, your mind rebels against generalization—“we,” “the Bubble”—as mine often does, please consider the possibility that such methodological risks can be generous, and should sometimes be taken on account of the urgency of the situation, in which 3 million people control 35 percent of U.S. wealth, 166 million control less than 2 percent, and inequality is rising and correlates with authoritarianism and violent conflict.

Even as I attempted to understand the world beyond the Bubble, it kept me aloft. After college, I set out to become a foreign correspondent, and at 22 spent two months reporting in Rwanda and Ethiopia. Then I checked into a luxury hotel in Kenya for a month: the Peponi, in Lamu. This seemed reasonable to me, so long as I wrote a novel there based on the reporting I’d just finished. I did, barely. And at the bar one evening, watching the sun set over the Indian Ocean, I met a movie producer who bought the rights to that novel then and there, which made staying in that colonial-chic hotel, expensive as it was, profitable.

This is the intersection of work and pleasure inside the Bubble. There is an internal logic to the decadence, an intuitive calculus that pays off, even if you don’t know how it will, exactly, until someone buys the rights, or writes the letter, or offers you their mansion for the week. The house is empty anyway, they might say, so please, go ahead, take the kids, don’t mention it.

Still, the rich like to believe in meritocracy, even fairness. These ideas are beloved by the media, and are one of the few bipartisan talking points. Barack Obama: “Anything is possible in America.” Donald Trump: “In America, anything is possible.” Famous examples demonstrate the seductive drama of economic mobility. Henry Ford was the son of a farmer. Steve Jobs, Oprah Winfrey, George Soros—and so on in every profession. Such examples not only make one-percenters feel good; they distract from the reality that, in the United States of America and elsewhere, success almost always, and predominantly, depends on wealth—and frequently comes at the expense of the less wealthy. I could afford to spend a month writing a book at a fancy hotel, which, when it came out, took attention away from novelists who were not as rich or connected as I am. I could afford to buy a drink for that producer, who bought the rights to my book, not someone else’s.

In that first summer of the pandemic, after I stopped volunteering in the morgue, the Black Lives Matter protests escalated. Tens of thousands of people filled the streets. In New York City, protesters set police cruisers ablaze and workmen nailed plywood over boutique windows in SoHo. One evening, I saw the vanguard of a crowd climb through a smashed store window on 12th Street, emerge with hoodies and T-shirts, and escape from a handful of pudgy, outnumbered cops. A few blocks farther south, I fell in behind a gaggle of excited teenagers. “This place is done,” one of them said, “let’s go to Nike.” In the news, such violations overshadowed far more numerous peaceful protests in New York, Minneapolis, Portland, and elsewhere, whose participants were regularly kettled, charged, and pepper-sprayed by police. None of this, in the short term, changed the balance of power or material lives of the rich or poor. But mass movements, gradually then all at once, have toppled governments.

Members of the ruling class knew this and were afraid. A venture-fund manager at a wedding in Barcelona told me that he expected, within his children’s lifetime, widespread violent conflict on account of resource scarcity and climate change. He was not the only one. One-percenters knew that the MDMA and the Veuve, the weekends in the George V, the time to turn stories of social mobility into election campaigns, the companies valuing profit over lives, the Dubai hotels built by indentured Bangladeshis—they knew that all of it cost more than what they read on their credit-card statements. In their most imaginative hours, some feared the bill would come due in a bloody revolution. A greater number displaced their fears onto Black teenagers, or black-clad antifascists, or American-flag-draped anti-vaxxers toting AR-15s on the courthouse steps.

The fear they shared was loss of wealth. Without ever saying so, they were very much afraid of losing their country houses, the space for the grand piano, the greenhouses, the pied-à-terre where their mother-in-law stayed without being in everyone’s business. They were afraid of processed supermarket cheese; they much preferred the organic stuff, which, they emphasized, would keep them alive longer. The same could not be said of their clothes, but they were afraid of losing the Prada bags anyway, the heavy zippers, the cashmere. They didn’t want to wear polyester windbreakers, or sit on Ikea sofas, or drive a Hyundai. They were afraid of losing the safer, sleeker Mercedes. They were afraid of losing all of it, any of it. And who wouldn’t prefer a Mercedes, anyway?

But the quality of the car was not what lay at the root of the fear. They feared losing wealth not for its own sake but because it was justified, in their own minds, by intelligence, hard work, determination—that is, by character. If they lost their wealth, then, well, who were they? The true fear was not loss of wealth but loss of self.

This article is excerpted from Nick McDonell’s new book, Quiet Street: On American Privilege.

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