holy shit new york is conducting an investigation of whether this jewish woman who is principal at a lower-class, black and latinx high school in the city is a communist because she’s known for the anti-racism and anti-segregation work she does
Over the years, Ms. Bloomberg has become one of the most outspoken and visible critics of New York City’s public schools, regularly castigating the Education Department’s leadership at forums and in the news media. Most of her criticism is aimed at actions that she says perpetuate a segregated and unequal educational system and that penalize black and Latino students. Through the years, she has helped organize protests and assemblies to push for integration and equal resources and treatment for her almost entirely black and Latino student body.
[…]
According to a letter sent to Ms. Bloomberg’s lawyers from the general counsel for the Education Department, Ms. Bloomberg and two unnamed teachers at the school are accused of belonging to the Progressive Labor Party, a Communist organization. They are also accused of recruiting students and inviting them to participate in the party’s activities, including marches.
Ms. Bloomberg, 53, denies those allegations.
A diminutive woman whose students often tower over her, Ms. Bloomberg did not set out to become an activist against her employer. She started her career teaching in Chicago before coming to work in New York City’s schools. When she was named principal of Park Slope Collegiate in 2004 — at the time, it was one of three small high schools in the former John Jay High School building in Park Slope — she said she found a deeply neglected school with a leaky roof, toilets that overflowed, moldy walls and doors that would not open properly. The student body was being neglected as well, she said, with few of its graduates ready for the rigors of college.
[…]
But that changed in 2010, when she learned the education department wanted to open a new high school in her building to serve white middle- and upper-class families in the neighborhood who had shunned Park Slope Collegiate. City officials proposed creating a selective secondary school to be called Millennium Brooklyn High School as a sister school to the overwhelmingly white Millennium High School in Manhattan.
Ms. Bloomberg said she did not understand why the white parents in the neighborhood could not simply send their children to one of the existing high schools. She said she thought the district had an excellent opportunity to integrate this black and Latino high school with white students from Park Slope and neighborhoods nearby.
But department officials were adamant about creating the new high school, which would screen students for test scores and behavior. As an enticement, the department promised to fix up the dilapidated John Jay building if Millennium came in.
“That really did it,” Ms. Bloomberg said.
She had been begging, for years for money to fix up her school. “You mean there is money? They’ve been sitting on money or they can find money if it’s for white students?” Ms. Bloomberg recalled thinking. “This was too much. It was right in our faces. It became clear to the students: ‘You’re not good enough.’”
[…]
But a fire had been lit. Over the years, Ms. Bloomberg supported her students in fighting the installation of metal detectors in their school, helped organize school assemblies to talk about police violence, and had spoken out passionately against segregation and what she considers racist Education Department policies.
Some teachers at Park Slope Collegiate disagreed with the assemblies and other protests that Ms. Bloomberg, who is extremely popular among her students and their parents — had supported and refused to participate.
[…]
Ms. Bloomberg denies any knowledge of organizing efforts for the Progressive Labor Party at the school. She said she could not control what groups other school workers or parents might belong to. She also said all events at Park Slope Collegiate were organized by the school and not by any outside organization.
This is precisely what happened in the 50s and 60s during the Red Scare to (White) people who organized with Black people for human rights equality.
My stepdad was one of those guys. He organized with Paul Robeson in NYC in the late 50s/early 60s. FBI came to his house to try to intimidate him multiple times. He requested his file via FOIA once – thing was a couple hundred pages long, completely redacted.
It is very significant that she is Jewish tho, not just “white.” Jews are accused of being communists (and fascists… somehow) on the regular. It goes along with the whole “Jews are more loyal to other Jews than to their country” trope, which often leads to violence (and was used to perpetuate the Holocaust, just saying.)
Jews were disproportionately affected by McCarthyism. Jews are always, ALWAYS accused of being the “other,” of being the rebel and rabblerouser disguised as a decent person trying to indoctrinate your children and rise up to control the world.
This is very specifically anti-semitic.
Yeah, the idea behind a lot of anti-Jewish conspiracy theories is that Jews are an insidious menace hellbent on bringing about “white genocide” by facilitating race mixing through communism.
Exhibit A:
This is why anti-Semitism and other forms of racism (anti-Blackness, anti-Latinx sentiment, etc.) are actually far more closely linked than people realise. Because white supremacists don’t see us as individuals asking for equal rights and protections, they see us all as a cabal of degenerates trying to topple the “natural order of things” by putting them on the bottom of the social pyramid (which, of course, it was totally fine to do to us, because we’re all “obviously inferior”).
So yeah, if you have a situation where a Jewish woman is being accused of communism for fighting on behalf of her Black and Latinx students, this right here is definitely the underpinning of that accusation.
Beltainefaerie's Flights of Fancy 