Public school parents in the Big Apple could pay $360 for a five-month “antiracism” workshop hosted by New York University, but only if they were white.
NYU hosted six, two-hour workshops from February through June and barred minorities from attending in what legal experts called a brazen violation of civil rights, the Washington Free Beacon reported.
“It’s quintessentially illegal,” said Ilya Shapiro, the director of constitutional studies at the Manhattan Institute, according to the Free Beacon. “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 workshop series, called “From Integration To Anti-Racist (FIAR),” was “designed specifically for white public school parents in New York City committed to becoming anti-racist,” according to a page on the university’s website that has since been removed. The workshop organizers also handed out a three-page flier on why they thought it was appropriate to segregate whites from minorities for the “antiracist” sessions.
“It’s helpful to have a space where other white people engaged in this process can support and challenge us, without having to always subject people of color to further undue trauma or pain as we stumble and make mistakes,” the flier states.
“A white space serves as a resource to people of color who want to work with white people but don’t want to have to spend all their energy dealing with the racism of white people,” the explainer adds.
Samantha Harris, an attorney who focuses on campus speech and civil rights issues, was shocked that the workshop’s organizers failed to see the irony of the so-called “antiracist” seminar.
“They are literally running a ‘whites only’ program in the interest of so-called social justice,” Harris told the Free Beacon. “I find it inconceivable that the people putting these programs together don’t see the irony.”
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Some participants were thankful that minorities were barred from attending, fearing that they would cause them “harm” by confessing their internalized racism.
“I was so grateful that there weren’t, you know, people of color in this space to hear me say [that] my first experience learning about what my race was was a black boy with a knife. That can be harming,” one parent said.
As parents came in for their first session, they were greeted by Woody Guthrie’s “All You Fascists Bound to Lose,” which was performed by the “Resistance Revival Chorus,” a group “of more than 60 womxn and non-binary singers.” During one session, a parent questioned if it was “a little counterintuitive” to hold a workshop on “antiracism” while excluding minorities, but Barbara Gross, one of the workshop’s organizers, said it was for the good of minorities that the seminar was for white people only.
“People of color are dealing with racism all the time,” Gross said. “Like every minute of every day. It’s a harm on top of a harm for them to hear our racist thoughts.”
NYU told the Free Beacon that it would be “reviewing these matters to determine whether they conform to our standards.”