City Hall will likely pay millions to settle a federal reverse-discrimination suit over blatant de Blasio-era bigotry at the Department of Education.
Judge Mary Kay Viskocil tossed the four plaintiffs’ sex-discrimination claims, but ruled that the racial ones can proceed, as they “offer evidence of a policy of race-based discrimination at [Chancellor Richard] Carranza’s DOE.”
Carranza, and then-Mayor Bill de Blasio, aren’t on the hook for those millions, but city taxpayers are.
Four white former female DOE administrators filed the $90 million lawsuit, claiming Carranza demoted and sidelined them in favor of people of color and charging that the chancellor’s crusade against “toxic” whiteness created a culture of “Us vs. Them.”
They assert that their replacements got picked with just “a tap on the shoulder,” without the positions being advertised and others interviewed.
One had a GED, while the white woman he replaced had a Harvard degree.
“There’re a lot of folks from the old guard at the Department of Education who did not want to see aggressive change and improvement and equity and so, look, of course that’s going to ruffle feathers,” said de Blasio at the time.
Carranza, meanwhile, declared that “the equity agenda championed by our mayor is my equity agenda.”
In his deposition, Carranza insisted that he wanted the most qualified candidate but also “diversity” in leaders who “looked like New York City,” and that de Blasio was a “micromanager” who had “final say especially for senior leadership roles” at the DOE.
And so the general public will pay twice for the last mayor’s racial obsessions: Once, with years of inferior top managers at the DOE, and again in cold hard cash for the women wronged by his and Carranza’s direct and ham-handed mismanagement.
Government hiring should be based on qualifications and ability, not on discrimination by race, ethnicity, gender, etc.
Let’s hope New York City can avoid electing any more mayors who don’t understand (or, worse, don’t care) what “illegal discrimination” means.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
