Leslie Chislett was an administrator in the New York City school system. Starting in 2017 she ran a group of about 15 employees whose goal it was to expand the availability of AP classes to more students. However, when she criticized the performance of a black subordinate, she was accused of committing racial microaggressions.
One subordinate, Akua Adefope, whom Plaintiff had criticized for “poor performance,” reported her to the DOE’s Office of Equal Opportunity and Diversity Management (“OEO”) and accused her of “‘microaggressions’ toward people of color, such as ignoring, dismissing, avoiding, interrupting, and belittling them.”...
Several of Chislett’s subordinates also denounced her for allegedly “holding employees of color back,” and when she objected, she was “accused” of being “‘white and fragile.’”
And it was about then that Mayor Bill de Blasio was elected. He selected a new Chancellor of the NY Department of Education named Richard Carranza. Both de Blasio and Carranza announced a new focus on DEI, which in practice meant millions of dollars spent on DEI training. As an employee of the department Chislett was required to participate.
During the first bias training on May 4, 2018, the instructor told participants that “white colleagues must take a step back and yield to colleagues of color” and “recognize that values of [w]hite culture are supremacist.” At the session, LaShawn Robinson, who led the OEA and would soon be promoted to Deputy Chancellor, told an employee, “We’ve all taken on whiteness.” The training also included PowerPoint slides that described the traits of “internalized white superiority,”including“individualism;” “denial;” “dominating space;” and “intellectualization.”
As it happens, the NY Times wrote about one specific training Chislett attended back in 2019:
During a training in January 2019 run by Amante-Jackson, which Chislett recorded, Amante-Jackson sounded notes that were anti-intellectual by mainstream standards, declaring that “this culture says you have to be most expert; you have to be perfect; it has to be said perfectly.” She continued, “The more degrees you have, the more expert you are. I think back — the most brilliant people in my life don’t even have diplomas from middle school. But we have been taught that you can only value people when they’ve got letters behind their name. All of that is coming from the water” — the water of white supremacy. “Eighty-eight percent of the entire world are people of color,” she claimed earlier in the session, “but 96 percent of the world’s historical content is white.” She went on to present “some characteristics of whiteness,” prominent among them “an obsession with the written word. If it’s not written down, it doesn’t exist.”
At another training in 2018, Chislett refused to participate in her own humiliation:
...during a June 2018 Courageous Conversation workshop that she attended, Ruby Ababio-Fernandez, a designated co-facilitator, who is also a D.O.E. official, proclaimed, “There is white toxicity in the air, and we all breathe it in.” The trainees were instructed to work with their tablemates, list qualities of white culture on a sheet of poster-size paper and hang their paper on the wall for everyone to read. Chislett felt she knew well by then the sorts of things they were meant to be writing, values that were critiqued at previous sessions: “individualism,” “Protestant work ethic,” “worship of data,” “worship of the written word,” “perfectionism,” “ideology of whiteness,” “denial.”
She told her group that she wasn’t going to take part; this derailed the table’s effort, and they wound up displaying an almost-empty sheet of paper. A young, white assistant principal at the table started to cry, Chislett recounted, and announced to the room, “I don’t want to be affiliated with this poster.” Chislett told everyone that she took responsibility for the barren sheet of paper. A Black principal at another table called out to her, “I feel you’re a horrible person.”
And of course the DEI training only made working with her subordinates worse.
On September 17, 2018, when Chislett asked a subordinate, Deonca Renee, why she was late to a meeting that she was supposed to help lead, Renee purportedly answered that Chislett was making a “race-based judgment” and could “not be trusted.” In a meeting the following week, Renee referred to the previous incident and said to Chislett: “How dare you approach me out of your white privilege!” Chislett complained to her supervisors but did not receive support. In a meeting on November 6, 2018, Chislett’s subordinate Adefope told her that she was “racist." Around the same time, Adefope and Renee told Chislett that “race is at the center of every conversation” they had with her. At one point, Chislett told her team that “this is becoming almost unbearable for me because there is increasing hostility.” In response, Renee stated: “How dare you use the word unbearable, there is black people dying in the street, you don’t have the right to use that term. You’re coming from the position of white privilege and white supremacy.”
Content from the trainings also spilled over into workplace interactions. OEA employees directed terminology from the trainings at Chislett, for example telling her that she was “socialized as a white person to be defensive.” In conversations, Chislett’s subordinates frequently spoke of the stereotypical “presumed values” of Caucasians, a perception frequently expressed in the training sessions.
In short, the trainings worked as intended and from then on every interaction at work was seen as part of a larger struggle against White Supremacy as embodied by Chislett. And of course anyone looking to avoid this was deemed guilty of "white fragility."
At an internal meeting on September 24, 2018, Shannon Maltovsky, Senior Director of Anti-Bias and School Support, shared PowerPoint slides listing ground rules for the office as they began to have “more conversations about race.” Chislett described the rules as explaining that “whites who wanted to withdraw or not participate in order to be safe were demonstrating white fragility, and it was no longer [the] right [of white people] to be safe in the workplace.”
Chislett complained repeatedly about the environment, as did other white employees. Those complaints were completely ignored. Eventually, Chislett's responsibility for managing the group was taken away on the grounds that she had created "a negative work environment." Her duties were then handed over to Akua Adefope, the subordinate who had first accused her of microaggressions.
The New York Post eventually published two critical articles about DOE Chancellor Richard Carranza's focus on DEI. Chislett commented anonymously for those articles (along with other employees). But her involvement in the story was discovered when the Post called the DOE to verify her job title. This situation culminated in a struggle session in which numerous employees berated her and demanded she quit.
The room became very tense, and Renee stood up. She addressed Chislett by name and told her that she was “prohibiting this work from happening.” Adefope stood up and called out Chislett as well. Other employees also stood up and told Chislett that she was “not willing to do the [equity] work” and that she “should just go.” This continued for approximately fifteen minutes before Ababio-Fernandez terminated it. Chislett “tried to defend herself” and left the meeting “humiliated;” “frightened;” and “in tears.”
Chislett eventually left and later sued the department over her treatment. Her case would eventually be dismissed but this week a judge overturned the portion of her claim related to a hostile work environment. That portion of the case can proceed to trial. After years of fighting this battle, Chislett herself seemed sad about the whole thing. Even this win doesn't restore what she has lost.
“While the higher court’s decision is a long-awaited vindication, it does not restore to me the longtime career that I loved and was successful in,” she told The Post.
“I knew at the time that what the DOE and its complicit leaders were doing was horribly divisive and unlawful,” she said, adding that former Mayor Bill de Blasio and his then-Chancellor Richard Carranza’s “anti-white policies were translated by their ignorant leaders into my daily humiliation and ridicule — something that was deeply wounding, and that I will never forget.
Hopefully a large judgment in her favor (or a settlement) will make her feel somewhat better and send a signal to others about the danger of indulging in racist DEI training.
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