A New York City school’s students were pictured wearing tags identifying them by their ethnicity while the school encouraged students to join ethnicity-based “affinity groups,” The New York Times reported Wednesday.
Students at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School, a private pre-K to 12th grade school, were pictured wearing name tags denoting their ethnic identity, such as “Black” “Jewish,” according to the NYT. Additionally, the school encouraged students to join organizations known as “affinity groups” that organized students by race, as well as religious and cultural identity.
The school’s spokesperson told the NYT that the name tags were only used at the beginning of the previous school year and were a mistake.
The school also encouraged affinity groups for parents; school officials in June emailed families inviting them to a “listening session” with the purpose of teaching parents about raising children in a “divisive moment,” according to the NYT.
The event was hosted by an affinity group for “families of color,” but was canceled and replaced by a meeting exclusively for non-white parents, according to the NYT. Jewish parents were welcome to the exclusive meeting, the NYT reported.
Fieldston School’s Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) department describes the groups as a way for “students to form community with other students who share their experiences based on identity.”
Some of the affinity groups the middle and upper school students can be in are for “boys of color,” “gender and sexual alliance,” trans and gender non-conforming” and “women of color coalition.”
Fieldston School’s younger students participate in a specific curriculum called “CARe,” a school spokesperson told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
The Conversations about Race, Ethnicity, Ethics, etc. (CARe) curriculum has students “practice identifying microaggressions in the safe spaces of their CARe affinity groups,” which are also divided by ethnicity.
A $55,000-a-year private school in NYC spent its curriculum promoting divisive identity politics, to the point where kids had to wear name badges with their ethnic backgrounds on them. Now the school has to manage the tensions created from its own teachings. pic.twitter.com/ImvpXbkUZS
— Yang (@AxiomAmerican) June 27, 2024
ECFS’s tuition for the 2024-2025 school year for every grade is $65,540, according to the school’s website.
The school faced backlash from pro-Palestinian students earlier in the spring, the NYT reported. Students vandalized the school with anti-Israel graffiti in June, and one Jewish student’s classmates called him an “ethnic cleanser” and a “colonizer,” according to the New York Post.
Universities and colleges in New York City have dealt with pro-Palestinian protesters wreaking havoc on campuses. Columbia University protesters arrested for vandalizing property and barricading employees inside a building had their charges dropped by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office.
