The keynote speaker of a diversity and inclusion conference at an elite Manhattan prep school likened some parents to “white supremacists,” and compared private schools to Capitol police officers who let rioters storm the gates. “There is no truer metaphor for independent schools... than that moment on January 6,” Rodney Glasgow said at the Dalton School’s conference in May, which was first reported by The Washington Free Beacon. His comments were a response to anti-racism efforts at Dalton—where tuition is $55,000—that spurred a hostile reaction from some parents and alums, who published an anonymous letter decrying the new “obsessive focus on race and identity.”

“Independent schools were built to replicate a plantation mentality,” Glasgow said in his speech. “Those parents and alums and whoever else were sending you those anonymous letters, talking about indoctrination. Schools have always been about indoctrination, mind you, it was just indoctrination into whiteness and wealth and privilege... They were okay with that indoctrination.” He went on to say that the only difference “between the white supremacists of today and the white supremacists of the slave era and colonialization era is that those white supremacists actually firmly believed, in the absence of true scientific knowledge, that they were supreme.”