Let’s be clear from the beginning: an apology does not erase harm.
During a New York City Community Education Council meeting, while a scholar was speaking, a Hunter College associate professor, Allyson Friedman, was caught on a live microphone making racist remarks about Black students — remarks about intelligence, remarks invoking segregation, remarks rooted in the oldest anti-Black tropes this country refuses to bury.
You cannot script irony this violent.
And let’s not pretend this was a “gaffe.” A hot mic doesn’t create racism — it reveals it. It exposes what is comfortable enough to be spoken when someone believes the public isn’t listening.
The real issue is not that she was heard. The issue is that she felt safe enough to say it.
Jane Crow Never Left the Building
We keep acting surprised when moments like this surface. But they are not anomalies. They are artifacts.
After Jim Crow was forced out of the front door, Jane Crow was invited in through the side entrance. She traded white hoods for institutional policy. She swapped overt exclusion for coded language — “achievement gaps,” “behavioral concerns,” “culture fit,” “rigor.”
And she settled comfortably into AmeriKKKa’s schools.
For generations, anti-Black assumptions have shaped how Black children are perceived — less capable, more disruptive, in need of control rather than cultivation. Those assumptions have justified underfunding, over-disciplining, tracking, surveillance, restraint, seclusion, and exclusion.
When a professor in 2026 invokes racist stereotypes about Black intelligence in a public education meeting, she is not inventing something new. She is participating in a lineage.
A lineage that stretches from segregated classrooms to redlined districts. From “separate but equal” to “failing schools.” From overt bans to subtle gatekeeping.
That lineage has a name. And it is power.
Words from Educators Are Not Harmless
Educators shape policy. They shape research. They shape discourse. They shape what becomes “common sense” in public conversation.
When someone positioned within higher education expresses anti-Black beliefs — whether framed as satire, trope, or “misunderstood commentary” — it signals something far deeper than personal bias. It signals that the architecture of inequity remains intact.
An apology cannot neutralize that.
Because the harm is not just emotional — though it is that. The harm is structural.
When Black families hear those words, they do not hear an isolated mistake. They hear confirmation of what they already navigate daily:
- Academic gatekeeping
- Adultification of Black children
- Biased discipline
- Lowered expectations
- The constant burden of proving humanity
And the insult is compounded by timing. During Black History Month — a month where institutions perform celebration while too often resisting transformation — Black students are reminded that their excellence is still debated in rooms of perceived power.
That is unacceptable.
This Is Why We Push
This is why we push for educational equity.
This is why we demand safe learning environments.
This is why we insist on accountability.
Because the disrespect has never been accidental.
It is systemic.
And until institutions treat anti-Black harm with the same urgency they treat reputational risk, trust will remain fractured.
The question is not whether she is sorry. The question is whether educational institutions are willing to confront the soil that allowed those words to grow.
- Accountability measures with teeth instead of press releases?
- Are they willing to examine hiring pipelines?
- Bias training that checks boxes but doesn’t shift belief systems?
- Tenure protections?
Or will this become another cycle: outrage, apology, review, silence?
Black Children Are Not Debates
Black children are not intellectual hypotheticals.
They are not rhetorical devices in academic discourse.
They are not problems to be theorized.
They are brilliant. They are complex. They are deserving of joy, rigor, safety, and respect — not commentary rooted in centuries-old dehumanization.
We are tired of hearing what people say when they think we are not listening.
We are tired of institutions protecting “free speech” more aggressively than they protect Black dignity.
We are tired of watching Jane Crow masquerade as neutrality.
The truth is simple: if your internal framework allows you to reference segregationist tropes casually, then your framework requires dismantling.”
As Martin Luther King Jr. reminded us, “There is a special place in hell for those who knowingly perpetuate injustice.
And dismantling requires more than apology. It requires reckoning.
We Will Not Whisper About This
This moment is not about cancellation. It is about clarity.
- Clarity that anti-Blackness remains embedded in educational spaces.
- Clarity that credentials do not equal consciousness.
- Clarity that silence is complicity.
Black families have always known the quiet part out loud. We have always understood that some adults entrusted with educating our children do not see them fully.
But we are no longer interested in polite endurance.
We are interested in true liberation.
And liberation demands that we name harm plainly, challenge power directly, and refuse to normalize disrespect — whether it slips out in a whisper or blares through an open microphone.
Black children deserve better than apologies.
They deserve transformation.