While traveling abroad this week, a black graduate student at New York University says he was told by a classmate that a class discussion was easier to facilitate without a “black presence” in the room. Now administrators at NYU’s Silver School of Social Work have acknowledged that it has a problem with “ongoing institutional racism,” especially in the classroom.
Shahem Mclaurin, a grad student in the Silver School, described the exchange on Tuesday in a widely shared
Twitter thread. Mclaurin said he didn’t want to miss his classes while he was in Paris. For one course he emailed his classmates to ask if any of them could FaceTime him during the class period.
No one obliged. So Mclaurin corresponded with the student who had led that day’s discussion to explain how to FaceTime him in the future, Mclaurin said in a phone interview.
Then, McLaurin said, that student replied, “I’m just trying to be honest with you on why we did not end up calling you.” Part of the reason, the student wrote in an email, was “because I found it easier to lead the discussion without black presence in the room, since I do feel somewhat uncomfortable with the (perceived) threat that it poses — something which I have been working on, but it will take more time than I would like it to be.”
Mclaurin posted a screenshot of the email on Twitter. “You would think,” he tweeted, that “NYU was not like this, especially their SOCIAL WORK program. But I guess it is. I’m very tired. I’ve been dealing with this since I started.”
