Last year, students at New York’s elite United Nations International School launched an anonymous social media campaign denouncing the school’s teachers and administrators for their “vast history of systemic racism,” “white liberal racist thinking,” and “direct, intentional, repeated racial trauma.” The students threatened to “cancel” their “oppressors” through social media shaming. Administrators immediately caved to their demands.
The saga began last June, when a group of students launched an anonymous Instagram account, Black at UNIS, which began posting dozens of anonymous and unverified accusations against the school and specific teachers. The accusations ranged from “microaggressions” (one teacher “used to mix up names of Black students”) to “white leadership failure,” such as refusing to hire black teachers and ignoring the bullying of black students. The Instagram campaign demanded that the school “fire the racist principals,” threatened to begin naming their “oppressors,” and pledged a policy of no mercy: “No one is obligated to protect you from those consequences and no one is obligated to forgive you.”
Later in the summer, the anonymous students formalized their demands in an online petition, which was signed by students, alumni, and parents. The petition claims that “for too long, UNIS has carefully curated the illusion of itself as a multicultural utopia while Black students and other marginalized groups suffer from a culture of ignorance and isolation.” The group demanded that the school hire a director of diversity and inclusion, institute mandatory antiracism trainings, “decolonize” the curriculum, create “safe spaces” for minorities, support the “exploration of diverse gender identities,” reject the “Eurocentric focus of mainstream academia,” and push an “agenda of intersectionality.”
The campaign caused an immediate stir among administrators, teachers, and parents. Within days of the Instagram channel’s launch, school executive director Dan Brenner sent an email to parents pledging that UNIS was “committed to creating solutions to ensure an anti-racist environment.” By the end of summer, Brenner had hired a diversity-consulting firm to conduct antiracist trainings, created a student-led antiracist board, began overhauling the academic curriculum to reflect the new orthodoxy, and hired a full-time Director of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. According to one source within the school, Brenner and the board of trustees “completely caved to pressure from these ‘activists,’ and passively accepted [the] list of their demands without hesitation.”