NYU Hosts White-Only Anti-Racism Workshop for Public School Parents in New York City

New York University is under fire for hosting a racial exclusion seminar for white public school parents to train them to become anti-racist and build “multiracial parent communities.”

The five-month 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,’ has been held half a dozen times this year and is delivered through New York University’s Steinhardt School of Education.

The educators who taught the course distributed a document produced by the Alliance of White Anti-Racists Everywherewho informed the class that the reason the seminar was kept all white was so attendees could ‘unlearn racism’ without inflicting ‘undue trauma or pain’ on minorities in the process.

The course was taught by Steinhardt faculty member Barbara Gross, who defended the class as all-white, saying, “People of color are dealing with racism all the time.” Like every minute of every day. It is harm as well as harm for them to hear our racist thoughts’

The course was taught by Barbara Gross, Steinhardt’s associate director of the school’s Educational Justice Research group, who stated that “people of color are dealing with racism all the time.” Like, every minute of every day.

“It’s a hurt as well as a hurt,” he said, “that they listen to our racist thoughts,” again explaining why the course would need to be a completely blank space.

Recordings of parts of the seminars appear to have been provided to the Beacon by a parent in the class.

During the inaugural session of the workshop, approximately a dozen parents were greeted with a rendition of Woody Guthrie’s song ‘All You Fascists Bound to Lose’, performed this time by the Resistance Revival Chorus, a group of non-binary women and 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 is in our bones and in our nervous system. What we have internalized. What we have inherited, ”he said, implying that racism is imprinted in the DNA of white people.

When a text titled ‘Characteristics of White Supremacist Culture’ by Tema Okun was discussed at the seminar, a father who works as an editor proclaimed: ‘I’ve been doing a lot of grammar and typo correction, and as I read this I was thinking: ‘Wow, I had no idea”.’

At one point, Gross shared with the class a moment of intolerant thinking that he once experienced internally.

She said that several “women of color” in her office were joking and playing games instead of working on the event they were supposed to plan.

‘I was thinking, ‘How can they do something?’ I had to hold myself back,’ she said.

Parents in the class received readings before their upcoming 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 Non-Indigenous People’ by Derek Rasmussen .

The curriculum also included ‘Internalized White Superiority’ and ‘Towards a radical white identity.’

Parents were assigned a series of anti-racist texts, including Robin DiAngelo’s “White Fragility.”

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 the shop likely violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, as well as laws that prohibit discrimination in contracting.

Ilya Shapiro, the director of constitutional studies at the Manhattan Institute told the Beacon: ‘It’s essentially illegal. This episode illustrates the horseshoe theory according to which radicals on the right and left end up agreeing to a social balkanization based on race. It’s like that social media meme: “Woke or KKK?”

The school told the Beacon it would review “these issues to determine if they meet our standards.”

NYU had a consent agreement with the Department of Education related to a handful of anti-Semitic incidents on campus when the workshop took place.