Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent Elite at St. Paul’s School

Khan’s Privilege is a chilling, clear-eyed look inside one of America’s most elite boarding schools — a training ground where advantage isn’t inherited so much as produced. Through immersive ethnography, he shows how institutions like St. Paul’s groom young people not just with resources, but with a worldview: entitlement disguised as ease, inequality reframed as merit, and power naturalized through culture. It’s a study of how elites learn to move through the world frictionlessly — and how that “effortless” grace is built on structures designed to exclude. A must-read for understanding how class reproduces itself with a smile, a handshake, and a legacy letter.