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She may well have been one of the stars of her high school. Her parents valued education and she seems to have worked hard to please them. On top of that, she does seem bright.

Judging from her writing, she may have been a bit overwhelmed by the rest of the non-affirmative action student body at Princeton. Many such students play a sandbagging game where they pretend to not work very hard and yet still get good grades. More than a few of the brightest actually could get top grades with minimal effort.

Many of her fellow students came from quite wealthy families and would have aspired to be in the elite eating clubs and other high status organizations. There would have been a significant class and cultural gap between her and such students.

She seems to have reacted to all of these differences by retreating into the more comfortable and less challenging embrace of other black students. No doubt the times, her school, and her sociology major all would have steered her to view the many types of differences between herself and other students in primarily racial terms.

Perhaps it was easier for her to redirect her discomfort with being measurably out of her depth into resentment at those so unlike herself. She has said of herself that she was admitted because of affirmative action. She along with all of her black friends would have been acutely aware that the non-affirmative action students tended to view them as not really up to the cut. For those who actually could have made the cut on their own merits, this would have been particularly enraging.

None of this would be worthy our concern if she showed signs of having grown in her later years beyond the egocentricities and narrowness of youth. Unfortunately I have not yet seen many signs that she has. Even more disturbing is that have not yet seen signs that there is much daylight between her resentment driven world view and that of her husband.