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Video with ‘racist, homophobic’ language surfaces at elite private school in New York

Several students at an elite private school were involved with a video that the school on Monday said showed them using “racist, homophobic and misogynistic language.”

The school, Ethical Culture Fieldston School, said in a statement that the students were seniors in the upper school — its high school division — on its campus in the Bronx. The head of the school, Jessica L. Bagby, wrote in a schoolwide email that one student involved in the incident had already withdrawn from Fieldston.

The students were recorded counting down “three, two, one” — and then saying “crack,” followed by a racial epithet.

Calling the language in the video a “clear violation of our community values and expectations,” Bagby said a disciplinary process began soon after school officials became aware of the video a couple weeks ago. A spokesman for Fieldston, Davidson Goldin, declined to comment on how the other students would be disciplined, citing student confidentiality.

Bagby’s email said a former student had also been involved in the video, which she said had been shot “a few years ago.” It surfaced amid a dispute between the students, according to a person who had been briefed on the situation but spoke on the condition of anonymity. The story was first reported by The Daily News, which posted the video on its website.

The video injected Fieldston into the national conversation about racism a little more than a month after a blackface video went viral at another private school in New York, Poly Prep Country Day School in Brooklyn. That incident propelled New York City’s private schools, which are overwhelmingly wealthy and white, into an often-painful dialogue as the city struggles to integrate its public schools and issues like income inequality and the concentration of wealth have increasingly figured in the political discussion.

Fieldston, with a tuition of $52,993 this academic year, according to its website, said nonwhite students make up nearly 40 percent of its 1,500-person student body, from prekindergarten through 12th grade. Fieldston said it grants more than $14 million a year in financial aid.

Once school officials learned of the video, the school acted rapidly. Bagby’s email Monday was the second about the video in two weeks. The first — from Bagby and the principal of the upper school, Nigel D. Furlonge — was sent Feb. 13.

“The anguish and outrage so many of us feel cannot be overstated enough,” it said. “We have a strict no-tolerance policy when it comes to acts of bias and hate speech.”

It also said that in conversations with faculty and staff members and administrators, “many students of color currently in the upper school shared stories of microaggressions and racism that they have experienced during their time” at Ethical Culture Fieldston.

In her email Monday, Bagby said she was “heartsick about the situation for our children and our school.”

She said the upper-school administration had led the investigation into the video and that the school’s discipline committee had met last week to discuss the matter.

She said that after consulting with her, Furlonge, the principal, had “affirmed the Discipline Committee’s recommendations of consequences.”

She would not provide details, but added, “The consequences for other students involved have been differentiated based on their responsibility for video, its content and how it was used.”

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