New York University hosted a months-long anti-racism workshop geared toward white public school parents that allegedly barred people of color from joining in what legal experts claim was a violation of civil rights law, according to a report.
The six-month-long workshop was “designed specifically for white public school parents in New York City committed to becoming anti-racist and to collaboratively building equitable, powerful, multiracial parents communities in their schools” and began in February, a listing states.
The series cost $360 per person and was hosted by the Education Justice Research and Organizing Collaborative at NYU Metro Center.
While the now-delisted workshop description and sign-up sheet say it was designed for white parents, it doesn’t expressly state that people of color were forbidden from joining.
Still, organizers distributed a handout to participants days before the first workshop titled “Why a White Space” which lists the reasons for hosting white-only group discussions, according to a copy obtained by the conservative publication, the Washington Free Beacon.
“For many, it sounds contradictory: ‘It’s racist if just white people get together. Isn’t that
segregation?'” reads the document produced by Alliance of White Anti-Racists Everywhere – Los Angeles, before listing seven reasons.
Some of the reasons include the suggestion that the responsibility of educating white people about racism shouldn’t be on the shoulders of people of color. Another reason listed was that white people need to have a safe space where they can make mistakes without having to subject people of color to further undue trauma or pain.
The workshop instructors reiterated the apparent need for a white-only space in the first workshop discussion, according to audio and video obtained by the Free Beacon.
A parent said it seemed “a little counterintuitive” to exclude people of color from the anti-racism series, to which instructor Barbara Gross said it was necessary, according to the outlet.
“People of color are dealing with racism all the time,” Gross reportedly said. “Like every minute of every day. It’s a harm on top of a harm for them to hear our racist thoughts.”
Despite organizers’ intentions, five lawyers told the right-wing publication that the workshop “almost certainly” violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which governs recipients of federal funding such as non-profit colleges like NYU.
One lawyer — Dan Morenoff, executive director of the American Civil Rights Project — also told the outlet that the seminars went against laws banning discrimination in contracting since participants were charged a fee.
“It’s quintessentially illegal,” Ilya Shapiro, the director of constitutional studies at the Manhattan Institute, told 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?’”
Shapiro, a conservative legal scholar, made headlines last year after he tweeted that President Biden would nominate a “lesser black woman” to the Supreme Court in 2022.
“They are literally running a ‘whites only’ program in the interest of so-called social justice,” Samantha Harris, an attorney who litigates campus speech and civil rights issues, told the publication. “I find it inconceivable that the people putting these programs together don’t see the irony.”
NYU told the Free Beacon that it was “reviewing these matters to determine whether they conform to our standards.”
The workshop began four years ago, Gross said, according to the outlet. It grew out of the Black Lives Matter movement and the police murder of George Floyd in 2020. Interest in learning how to be anti-racist was reportedly at an all-time high during the months following his killing.