New York University is under fire for hosting a racially exclusionary seminar for white public school parents to train them to become anti-racist and build ‘multiracial parent communities.’
The five-month-long course, which cost $360 to attend, was, according to a handful of legal experts, a clear violation of civil rights law, according to the Washington Free Beacon.
The seminar, called ‘From Integration to Anti-Racism,’ was held half-a-dozen times this year and was run through NYU’s Steinhardt School of Education.
The educators running the course distributed a document produced by the Alliance of White Anti-Racists Everywhere, which informed the class that the reason the seminar was being kept all white was so attendees could ‘unlearn racism’ without inflicting ‘undue trauma or pain’ on minorities in the process.
‘From Integration to Anti-Racism’ was an all-white course offered by NYU to public school parents in an effort to teach them how to unlearn racism away from racial minorities
The course was run by Steinhardt faculty member Barbara Gross, who defended the all-whiteness of the class by saying: ‘People of color are dealing with racism all the time. Like every minute of every day. It’s a harm on top of a harm for them to hear our racist thoughts’
The course was run by Barbara Gross, Steinhardt’s associate director of the school’s Education Justice Research group, claimed that ‘people of color are dealing with racism all the time. Like every minute of every day.’
‘It’s a harm on top of a harm,’ she said, ‘for them to hear our racist thoughts,’ explaining again why the course would need to be an all white space.
Recordings of parts of the seminars appear to have been provided to the Beacon by a parent in the class.
During the inaugural workshop session, roughly a dozen parents were welcomed with a rendition of the song ‘All You Fascists Bound to Lose’ by Woody Guthrie, performed this time for the Resistance Revival Chorus – a group of women and non-binary singers.
Gross repeatedly instructed participants to ‘resist the urge to intellectualize’ the content of what they were about to learn.
‘What we know intellectually is very different from what’s in our bones and in our nervous systems. What we have internalized. What we have inherited,’ she said, implying that racism is as good as imprinted on white DNA.
When the seminar discussed a text called ‘Characteristics of White Supremacy Culture’ by Tema Okun, one parent who works as an editor proclaimed: ‘I’ve been correcting grammar a lot and typos, and reading this I was thinking, ”Wow, I had no idea”.’
At one point Gross shared with the class a moment of bigoted thinking she once internally experienced.
She said that several ‘women of color’ in her office were joking around and playing games instead of working on the event they were meant to be planning.
‘I was thinking, ‘How can they get anything done. I had to catch myself,’ she said.
Parents in the class were given readings ahead of their next meetings that included: ‘Why It’s So Hard to Talk to White People About Racism’ by Robin DiAngelo, and ‘Qallunology 101: A Lesson Plan for the Non-Indigenous’ by Derek Rasmussen.
The syllabus also included ‘Internalized White Superiority’ and ‘Toward a Radical White Identity.’
Parents were assigned a number of antiracist texts, including Robin DiAngelo’s ‘White Fragiity’
NYU’s Steinhardt School of Education offered the class to public school parents – according to several attorneys, the course may have violated federal Civil Rights law
The Free Beacon polled five attorneys, all of whom said that the workshop in all likelihood violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, in addition to violating laws that ban discrimination when establishing contracts.
Ilya Shapiro, the director of constitutional studies at the Manhattan Institute told the Beacon: ‘It’s quintessentially illegal. This episode illustrates the horseshoe theory whereby left- and right-wing radicals end up agreeing on race-based societal balkanization. It’s like that social media meme: ‘woke or KKK?”
The school told the Beacon that it would review ‘these matters to determine whether they confirm to our standards.’
NYU was under a consent agreement with the Department of Education pertaining to a handful of anti-Semitic incidents on campus when the workshop took palace.
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