By: Hellen Zaboulani
The professors at Baruch College seem to be wrapped up in racial divide.
A lawsuit was filed against CUNY by a white professor, who says a group of professors in the school’s Sociology and Anthropology Department accuse all white colleagues of racism without citing details or engaging in open conversation. As reported by the NY Post, in the lawsuit, Professor Robin Root, 53, says that minority faculty members in one department demanded Caucasian educators undergo “white fragility”, by reading Robin Di Angelo’s book of the same name, and train to become “better people” and reflect on “white normativity”. Root says she was humiliated by the allegations, and claims she was singled out during a meeting, and then ignored by administrators when she attempted to file a formal discrimination complaint.
“It was pretty heartbreaking,” Root told The Post. “I thought we were operating as a team here, to address these issue”, she says. “Now we’re marking out who is white, and who is not white, and you’ve decided without knowing anything about me, without knowing about my background, that I am only white … At a minimum I just wanted to have some dialogue about this, because it is complex and sensitive.”
In her Manhattan Supreme Court litigation, Root maintains that one member of the Faculty of Color Caucus refused to talk about discrimination with white co-workers, rather alleging that “all of you behave and practice at different levels of whiteness”. Root says she is perfectly willing to read “White Fragility”, and that she was the one who suggested it to the department months ago.
Root maintains that she is hurt by the divide and racism towards white colleagues “for no other reason than their skin color”. She says in the suit that she has spent her academic career “studying and examining complex issues of race and color,” and has helped her department hire minority faculty members.
Root also claims that her complaints of discrimination and a hostile work environment were ignored and brushed aside by the administration. She says when administrators later agreed she’d “been mistreated”, they advised her to silence her complaint so as to keep the school from looking bad. Through the litigation, Root is seeking unspecified damages and for the court to find CUNY liable for discrimination and retaliation against her.
CUNY declined comment on the suit. A member of the Faculty of Color Caucus, which includes three non-white members of the school’s 11-member Sociology and Anthropology department, also declined comment.
