NYC teacher allegedly fired to fulfill ‘equity’ agenda after sharing Holocaust story, refusing to perform ‘Wakanda’ salute

According to Karen Ames, who had been with the Department of Education for 30 years, she was targeted by Chancellor Richard Carranza's "Disrupt and Dismantle" campaign. "Disrupt and dismantle" were terms used to describe the meaning of equity by Washington state's Equity Task Force.

"The agenda of Chancellor Carranza and his senior leadership team was euphemistically touted as an ‘equity platform’ but in reality, it was a platform used to create gender, age, racial and ethnic divisions in the NYC School system," she claimed in court filings.

Ames brought up a few examples of how this equity platform was implemented. She described an implicit bias training in 2019 where employees were asked to share their personal stories, so Ames discussed the story of her grandparents, who are both Holocaust survivors.

After sharing this story, Ames alleges that her colleague Rasheda Amon told her to "check yourself" and that the training session "is not about being Jewish! It's about black and brown boys of color only."

The same quotes were published in the New York Post in 2019. An anonymous woman told the story of her grandmother experiencing Nazi bombs rain upon her home city of Lodz, Poland, before fleeing to hide in the forest with her four children from the newly-imposed Nazi authorities. Her grandfather spent six years in a Nazi concentration camp where he witnessed his own mother and sister's execution at the hands of the authorities.

"It was like 1939 all over again," the anonymous woman said at the time. "I couldn't believe this could happen to me in NYC!" She credited two of her colleagues, however, who defended her during the altercation.

It is unconfirmed whether Ames is the anonymous source from the 2019 story.

Ames also claims that she was admonished for refusing to perform a "Wakanda Forever" salute during a superintendents meeting. The salute, which originates from Black Panther, involves crossing your arms across your chest. Ames to described it as a salute to "black power."

She also says that Carranza's top deputy, Cheryl Watson-Harris, interrogated her on a number of personal matters during a chauffeured car ride, including by asking her inappropriate questions surrounding her ethnic background.

"This case highlights that those in power often put their own agendas before the well-being of our community. It’s a terrible example for our children to be taught to judge people on anything other than merit," Ames's lawyer said of the incident.

Despite being a highly acclaimed teacher who was known for her success in teaching math to underprivileged students, Watson-Harris allegedly handed Ames a notice of termination, stating that the department "was moving in a new direction." Colleagues were allegedly prevented from communicating with Ames and all of her work had been erased, right down to the school district's color scheme which Ames designed.

After the single mother pleaded to not be terminated, she was given the choice of being demoted or being terminated. Seeking to protect herself financially, Ames accepted the demotion.

However, the demotion effectively amounted to a firing. Ames was relocated to the Office of School Health, where she says that she was not given any assignments for a period of five months. She ultimately decided to move to another school district outside of New York.

Ames is now suing the department for $150 million, while the NYC Department of Education "strongly" denied the claims made against them.

It is not the first time Carranza's Department of Education has been subject to controversy over their equity rules.

In 2019, the department came under scrutiny after it was revealed that staff were being told to actively favor black students over white students because "that's what racial equity is."

"If I had a poor white male student and I had a middle-class black boy, I would actually put my equitable strategies and interventions into that middle class black boy because over the course of his lifetime he will have less access and less opportunities than that poor white boy," a consultant for the department said.

NYC Parents Union Mona Davids, who is black, blasted the training session at the time. "It’s completely absurd — they want to treat black students as victims and punish white students. That defeats the purpose of what bias awareness training should be."

A public middle school teacher in Manhattan also complained about the training. "My ancestors were enslaved and murdered because of their religion, I am now being forced to become 'liberated' from my whiteness. I am being persecuted because of the circumstances of my birth. I was not aware that I needed to be liberated from how God created me."

"I will never be brainwashed by Richard Carranza and his minions. I cannot support a schools chancellor who is implicitly biased against me and my children," she said.

In another 2019 incident, Carranza held a "white supremacy culture" training session for school administrators, where he made the racist claims that concepts such as perfectionism, right to comfort, individualism, "worship of the written word," objectivity were products of white supremacy.

Opposition to objectivity is common among proponents of critical social justice. A recent report from an educational organization known as Pathway, which received tens of millions in financial support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, argued that even considering math to be objective is racist, and that students should not be too focused on finding the right answer. The "concept of mathematics being purely objective is unequivocally false," the report claims.