{"id":144086,"date":"2026-02-24T19:59:30","date_gmt":"2026-02-24T19:59:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/144086\/"},"modified":"2026-02-24T19:59:30","modified_gmt":"2026-02-24T19:59:30","slug":"parents-officials-condemn-racist-remarks-at-uws-school-board-meeting","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/144086\/","title":{"rendered":"Parents, officials condemn racist remarks at UWS school board meeting"},"content":{"rendered":"

Close to 150 parents, advocates and elected officials met Tuesday to condemn a Hunter College professor\u2019s racist remarks at Upper West Side school board meeting<\/a> \u2014 an incident that speakers said was indicative of anti-Black sentiment lingering beneath the surface in public schools.<\/p>\n

The press conference, which was held online after this week\u2019s historic blizzard, came just hours before Chancellor F\u00e9lix Matos Rodr\u00edguez of the City University of New York (CUNY) system, which includes Hunter, was set to appear before the New York State Legislature to respond to Gov. Hochul\u2019s proposed state budget<\/a> for higher education.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou gotta believe the Black members on that committee will be asking the CUNY Chancellor what you planning to do, boy,\u201d Assemblywoman Chantel Jackson (D-Bronx) said during the call. \u201cLike, what\u2019s the plan?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cShe has to go, because if it was one of us, we would have been gone too \u2014 period,\u201d said Councilwoman Rita Joseph (D-Brooklyn), chair of the higher education committee. \u201cI\u2019m here to fight for it. I\u2019m here as the chair to make sure that CUNY does right by us.\u201d<\/p>\n

The professor, Allyson Friedman, was caught on hot mic during a Feb. 10 Community Education Council 3 meeting on the Upper West Side interrupting Black students fighting to save their school at risk of closure<\/a>, saying: \u201cThey\u2019re too dumb to know they\u2019re in a bad school.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cApparently Martin Luther King said it: If you train a Black person well enough, they\u2019ll know to use the back. You don\u2019t have to tell them anymore,\u201d she continued, incorrectly attributing the quote to the civil rights activist.<\/p>\n

Some on Tuesday\u2019s call said that Friedman deserved to be fired.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are demanding specifically the CUNY Chancellor initiate immediate termination processes at Hunter College,\u201d said Tanesha Grant, a grandparent in School District 3 and the executive director of Parents Supporting Parents NY, which organized the press conference. \u201cAnti-Black rhetoric is disqualifying.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"RemoteRemote participants’ jaws dropped and their faces looked horrified after the comments.<\/p>\n

A Hunter College spokesman has said the school is reviewing the incident. Friedman\u2019s union, the Professional Staff Congress (PSC-CUNY), called Friedman\u2019s comments \u201ctroubling and offensive.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cPSC expects that CUNY\u2019s review will be conducted in accordance with the due process protections of the union contract,\u201d read the statement. \u201cAdherence to these rights and to the value that racism is unacceptable in any educational setting will ensure that the necessary process of repair moves forward.\u201d<\/p>\n

But participants said accountability must go beyond disciplinary action against an individual.<\/p>\n

NeQuan McLean, the president of Community Education Council 16 in Brooklyn, said advocates are calling on New York to require Black Studies statewide. The city rolled out a Black Studies curriculum last academic year<\/a>, but not all local public schools are using it.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe want to obtain the law so that it\u2019s not determined by the school system or the district: Who could do it or who should do it, or is there enough of money to do it? It\u2019s there, it\u2019s ready, and it\u2019s able to do what we need to do,\u201d McLean said.<\/p>\n

Jumaane Williams, the city\u2019s public advocate, said Friedman should be held accountable, but that he \u201cwant[ed] to go deeper \u2014 because it\u2019s deeper for me.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI want to join with you and reach out to the administration and to the Department of Education to make sure we\u2019re really figuring out not just how to hold this one person accountable,\u201d Williams said, \u201cbut to really figure out systemic issues.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"NewNew York City Public Advocate Jumaane Williams is pictured in Manhattan on Sunday, Nov. 30, 2025. (Theodore Parisienne \/ New York Daily News)<\/p>\n

Whitney Toussaint, the president of Community Education Council 30 in Queens, said the incident was a manifestation of a deeper issue of racism on school boards.<\/p>\n

\u201cI know that the conversation right now is a discussion on the extremely virulent anti-Blackness that was displayed at the CEC 3 meeting,\u201d she said. \u201cHowever, we are speaking to this because this was literally just a symptom of what is going on in these spaces.\u201d<\/p>\n

Toussaint said she was once lunged at during a heated school board meeting \u2014 an incident that she sees as indicative of how aggression toward Black leaders, particularly women, has been normalized. She also said there\u2019s a history of parents using racist tropes in debates over school zones, mergers and closures<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you are a Black parent leader in this space, you are made to sit through indignity after indignity when people use anti-Black stereotypes to attack our community,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

Friedman\u2019s comments went viral almost two weeks later after a recording of the CEC 3 meeting was posted online.<\/p>\n

In a statement, Friedman has said she was explaining systemic racism to her child when she inadvertently unmuted, capturing only part of the conversation.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy complete comments make clear these abhorrent views are not my own, nor were they directed at any student or group,\u201d Friedman said. \u201cI fully support these courageous students in their efforts to stop school closures. However, I recognize these comments caused harm and pain, while that was not my intent I do truly apologize.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Close to 150 parents, advocates and elected officials met Tuesday to condemn a Hunter College professor\u2019s racist remarks…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":144087,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[67,85,267,75,84,83,9,24,264,12,63],"class_list":["post-144086","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-manhattan","tag-education","tag-latest-headlines","tag-local-news","tag-manhattan","tag-manhattan-headlines","tag-manhattan-news","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-new-york-county","tag-news","tag-nyc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/144086","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=144086"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/144086\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/144087"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=144086"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=144086"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=144086"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}