A Yale Law School administrator urged the Yale Law Journal to host a diversity trainer who claimed that antisemitism is a form of anti-blackness, according to the Washington Free Beacon.
The trainer also reportedly suggested the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) “artificially inflates the number of anti-Semitic hate crimes,” the outlet said on Tuesday:
The comments from diversity trainer Ericka Hart—a self-described “kinky” sex-ed teacher who works with children as young as nine—shocked members of the predominantly liberal law review, many of whom characterized the presentation as anti-Semitic, according to a memo from Yale Law Journal editors obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.
“I consider myself very liberal,” one student quoted in the document stated. However, Hart’s presentation, that was delivered on September 17 to members of the law review, was “almost like a conservative parody of what antiracism trainings are like.”
The Beacon article continued:
The controversy began when a law journal editor asked Hart why her presentation had addressed inequities like “pretty privilege” and “fatphobia” but not anti-Semitism. According to the memo, which collected feedback on the training from 33 law journal editors, Hart responded that she’d already covered anti-Semitism by discussing anti-blackness, because some Jews are black. She also raised questions about FBI data showing that Jews are the most frequent targets of hate crimes—implying, in the words of one journal editor, that the people compiling those statistics had an “agenda.”
“She basically said anti-Semitism is a subset of anti-blackness,” the editor said during an interview with the Beacon. “She didn’t recognize there could be anti-Semitism against white people.”
Reactions to the training session was nearly uniformly negative, and 82 percent of editors said they would not invite Hart again.
“The training was held the same day that Yaseen Eldik, the law school’s diversity director, told second-year law student Trent Colbert that his refusal to apologize for a party invite could cause him trouble on the bar exam,” the Beacon article said.
Yale administrators had pressured the student to apologize for a “triggering ” email message in which he described his apartment as a “trap house,” the outlet reported on October 13.
Meanwhile, the journal had solicited ideas for a diversity trainer in the months prior, the recent memo said, and Eldik recommended Hart.
For several of the students, the most offensive part about Hart’s presentation was its anti-intellectualism.
“We are supposed to be the smartest law students in the world,” one editor said, adding, “Yet for two hours, we were forced to sit quietly and unquestioningly take on faith asinine arguments devoid of any evidence.”