Audio Shows Grace Church Head Teacher Admitting 'We're Demonizing White People for Being Born'

A whistleblowing teacher at Manhattan's elite Grace Church School released audio Tuesday to corroborate his claims that the head teacher is "indoctrinating" students in the name of "anti-racism."

The audio, which was put out by the Foundation Against Intolerance & Racism, relays a March 2 conversation between math teacher Paul Rossi and Head of School George Davison. In the discussion, Davison appears to agree with the now-dismissed teacher's accusation that the school is teaching white students that they are inherently "evil."

Rossi sparked the school's latest controversy last week after New York Times writer Bari Weiss published an essay in which Rossi accused the administration of obsessively discussing race and "demonizing" white students.

A school spokesperson on Tuesday confirmed to the media that Rossi declined to renew his contract for next year but will remain on the payroll for the rest of the current term before departing.

"Having a teacher, an authority figure, talk to you endlessly, every year, telling you, that because you have whiteness, you are associated with evils, with all these different evils, it's not the same as taking a physical thing, because it doesn't affect your moral value. That's the problem," Rossi can be heard telling Davison in early March, in the audio released this week.

"I'm agreeing with you that there has been a demonization that we need to get our hands around, in the way in which people are doing this understanding," Davison replies. "We're demonizing white people for being born."

"And are some of our students white people? OK, so we're demonizing white kids. Why don't you just say it?" Rossi continued.

In Rossi's essay last week, he decried the school's push against using any terms deemed "non-inclusive," including "mom and dad" to refer to one's parents.

As academic institutions at all education levels are grappling with "identity politics" debates, some say "woke" culture has gone overboard in an attempt to be inclusive.

"My school, like so many others, induces students via shame and sophistry to identify primarily with their race before their individual identities are fully formed," Rossi wrote in the Substack post last week, setting off a debate over the $57,000-a-year school's curriculum.

"We are using language that makes [white kids] feel less than, for nothing that they are personally responsible for," the Davison says in the audio.

This week, Grace Church School issued a statement from Davison that addressed Rossi's essay but denied the conversation took place, despite the newly released audio.

"As you may be aware, a member of the faculty wrote and posted an article that is critical of Grace and of our efforts to build a school where everyone feels they belong," Davison wrote. "The process of building a community is often challenging, and I am disappointed that this individual felt it necessary to air his differences in this way."

Newsweek reached out to the school for comment but did not hear back before publication.