Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza’s denials of anti-white bias at the Department of Education will be “proven to be lies,” said the lawyer representing three executives in a $90 million suit.
“I’m not surprised that he denied it,” Davida Perry said Thursday in a press briefing formally announcing the blockbuster suit, first reported on the front page of Wednesday’s Post. “I’m confident that when this case moves forward, his denials are going to be proven lies.”
Three high-ranking DOE employees, all white women, claim that they were demoted without cause in favor of less-qualified persons of color shortly after Carranza took the reins of the agency in April 2018.
Carranza has refused to directly address specific allegations against him and the DOE, but called the suit’s claims “absolutely not true” on Wednesday.
But Perry said that the allegations are not only founded, they’re far more widespread than even the eight-figure lawsuit lets on.
“There are going to be many people that are going to come forward and say that he said those things that he’s now denying saying,” said Perry, who also represents a fourth purported casualty of Carranza’s crusade against “toxic” whiteness not taking part in the initial lawsuit.
In one rant detailed in the filing, Carranza purportedly bellowed to DOE employees assembled in the rotunda of the department’s lower Manhattan headquarters in June 2018 that they could back his changes or dust off their résumés.
“If you draw a paycheck from DOE . . . get on board with my equity platform or leave,” Carranza said according to the filing, which referred to the statement as a “totalitarian threat.”
Carranza has maintained that his only agenda in shuffling the upper ranks of DOE leadership was to find the personnel most qualified to help students.
“Then those are my clients,” Perry said. “He wants them, he already had them. He’s removed them. So what I say to that is his definition of qualification is proven in race and gender.”
Perry also parried Carranza’s justification that city schoolkids, “70 percent of whom are black and brown children,” like to see the DOE’s seats of power filled by people who look like them.
“That’s a problem,” said Perry. “That’s where he’s distorting the human rights law because he’s making decisions based on the color of people’s skin and their gender and that’s illegal.”
Additional reporting by Aaron Feis