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….