In the third episode of our NYC private school series, Ellie and Carrie speak with Alyssa, a Black Spence alumna whose experience of growing up in uneasy proximity to whiteness was lonely and damaging. Alyssa, whose family represented what Caitlin Flanagan describes as "the bread and butter of these schools... the two-career couple who care greatly about their children’s education and can afford it, but not easily," struggled to fit in with her wealthier white peers. A light-skinned Black woman with roots in what W. E. B. Du Bois deemed the "Talented Tenth," Alyssa's mother taught her to reject her blackness in the name of respectability. The disassociation brought on by the pressures of assimilation made Alyssa an anxious and compulsively polite child who could not freely be herself. One of the two Black students in her grade for her first eight years at Spence, Alyssa became a self-described "poser" whose desperation to be seen as white only led to isolation. She unpacks the traumas of self-surveillance and external adultification as a Black girl taught not to love herself. Reckoning years later with images of jubilant enslaved people in the Spence dance studio's wallpaper, Alyssa gathers the fragments of a fractured identity.