#Manhattan’s most privileged kids play victim — and teachers cave

An elite Gotham school has succumbed to the new racial hysteria. Last year, students at the United Nations International School, which educates the children of Turtle Bay diplomats at a cost of up to $44,000 per year, launched an anonymous social-media campaign denouncing their teachers and administrators for their “vast history of systemic racism,” “white-liberal racist thinking” and “direct, intentional, repeated racial trauma.”

The students threatened to “cancel” their “oppressors” through social-media shaming — and administrators immediately caved in to their demands.

The saga began last June, when a group of students launched an anonymous Instagram channel, Black at UNIS, where they posted dozens of anonymous and unverified accusations against the school and specific teachers. The accusations range from “micro-aggressions” — a teacher who “used to mix up names of black students” — to “white leadership failure,” such as allegedly refusing to hire black teachers and ignoring the bullying of black students.

The Instagram account demanded that the school “fire the racist principals” and threatened to begin naming “oppressors.” The rhetoric dripped with menace: “If you’ve been called out on this account, no one is obligated to forgive you, especially not those that you’ve traumatized.”

Later, the students formalized their demands in an online petition, signed by students, alumni and parents. These included hiring a director of diversity and inclusion, “decolonizing” the curriculum, creating “safe spaces” for minorities, rejecting the “Eurocentric focus of mainstream academia” and promoting “intersectionality.”

Remember: The United Nations International School is quite literally a playground of the world’s elites. The school teaches the children of diplomats, as well as those of Manhattan families who generally work in finance, Big Tech and business. The school’s politics range from liberal to ultra-liberal.

So lefty is the school that after President Trump’s election in 2016, leaders held “three days of counseling” and “a series of emergency assemblies, where tearful students ranted about being deported,” according to an insider.

So you might think school leaders would dismiss these bizarre accusations and demands, right? Wrong.

Within days of the launch of the Instagram channel, Dan Brenner, the executive director of the school, sent an e-mail to parents pledging that the school was “committed to creating solutions to ensure an anti-racist environment.” By the end of summer, Brenner had hired a diversity consulting firm to conduct anti-racist trainings, created a student-led anti-racist board and began overhauling the academic curriculum to reflect the new orthodoxy.

According to one source within the school, Brenner and the board of trustees “completely caved in to pressure from these ‘activists.’ ”

One staff member told me that the school “is currently in the grips of a mania,” which has led to an unprecedented amount of “division, paranoia and hatred” within the institution. The staffer added: “There are a small number of employees who see this ‘anti-racist training’ as pure indoctrination but do not know what to do.”

They are afraid of being labeled “racist” and denounced on social media. According to the twisted circular logic of contemporary anti-racism, adopted by the activists, any objection, no matter how reasonable, is itself further evidence of racism. This allows the anonymous activists to steamroll the institution and establish an inside-outside game: they mobilize power within the institution and ensure compliance through outside threats.

The brouhaha opens a window onto our larger political moment. The children of society’s elites — the most privileged people on the planet — have usurped the mantle of the oppressed to satisfy their own moral narcissism and exercise power over their elders. And the adults, supremely anxious about any threat to their status, immediately bow to the teenagers leading the online mob.

This basic pattern is now replicating itself through every major institution in the country, from federal agencies to state boards of education to Fortune 500 companies. More than anything, what’s needed in America is moral courage — precisely the virtue that has vanished from the character of men and women who administer US institutions. 

Reached for comment, Brenner, the executive director, said the institution must commit to “anti-racist beliefs” in every aspect of its operations. “It is important for all facets of the UNIS community to engage in an honest dialogue on race and privilege to improve the character of our community. At UNIS, Black Lives Matter.”

Twitter: @RealChrisRufo