New York University has come under fire for hosting a racially exclusionary seminar to train white public school parents to be anti-racist and build ‘multiracial parenting communities’.
The five-month course, which cost $360, is a clear violation of civil rights laws, according to a handful of legal experts, according to the Washington Free Beacon.
The seminar, titled ‘From Integration to Anti-Racism’, was held half a dozen times this year and was run through NYU’s Steinhardt School of Education.
Teachers running the course distributed a document produced by the Alliance of Whites Anti-Racist Everywhere, which informed the class that the reason for keeping the seminar white was so that attendees could ‘liberate racism’ without causing ‘undue hurt or pain’. Minorities in the process.
‘Integration to Anti-Racism’ was an all-white course offered by NYU to public school parents in an attempt to teach how to de-racist racial minorities.
The course was led by Steinhardt faculty member Barbara Gross, who defended all whiteness in the class by saying: ‘People of color deal with racism all the time. Like every minute of every day. Hearing our racist thoughts is more harmful than harmful to them’.
The course was led by Barbara Gross, Steinhardt’s associate director of the school’s educational justice research group, asserting that ‘people of color deal with racism all the time. Like every minute of every day.’
‘It’s a loss on top of a loss,’ he said, ‘for them to hear our racist thoughts,’ again explaining why the course needs to be an all-white space.
Recordings of parts of the seminar appear to have been provided to Beacon by a parent of the class.
During the opening workshop session, about a dozen parents were greeted with a rendition of Woody Guthrie’s ‘All You Fascists Bound to Loose’, this time performed for the Resistance Revival Chorus – a group of female 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 our bones and our nervous system. which we have internalized. What we inherited,’ he said, adding that racism is as good as imprinted on white DNA.
When a text called ‘Characteristics of White Supremacy Culture’ by Tema Okun was discussed at the seminar, a parent who works as an editor declared: ‘I did a lot of grammar and type corrections, and reading it I was thinking, “Wow, I had no idea”.
At one point Gross shared with the class a moment he experienced internally.
She said several ‘colored women’ in her office were joking around and playing games instead of working on the event they were supposed to be planning.
“I was thinking, ‘How can they do anything?’ I had to catch myself,’ she said.
Parents in the class were given lessons before their next meetings including: ‘White People to Talk to White People About Racism’ by Robin DeAngelo and ‘Calunology 101: A Lesson Plan for the Non-Indigenous’ by Derek Rasmussen.
The syllabus included ‘Internalized White Superiority’ and ‘Towards a Radical White Identity’.
Parents were assigned a number of conflicting texts, including Robin DeAngelo’s ‘White Fragility’.
NYU’s Steinhardt School of Education offered the class to public school parents — a course that, according to several attorneys, could violate federal civil rights laws.
The Free Beacon polled five attorneys, all of whom said the workshop in all likelihood violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, the law that prohibits discrimination in contract placement.
Elia Shapiro, director of constitutional studies at the Manhattan Institute, told the Beacon: ‘It’s completely illegal. This episode illustrates the horseshoe theory through which left- and right-wing radicals agree on race-based social balkanization. It’s like that social media meme: ‘Wick or KKK?’
The school told the Beacon that they will ‘review these matters to determine if they uphold our standards.’
NYU was under a consent agreement with the Department of Education regarding a handful of anti-Semitic incidents on campus when the workshop took over the mansion.