The Racist At Smith

In a remarkable article, New York Times reporter Michael Powell tells the story of woke gone awry at Smith College. Between the exceptionally strong writing, incredible quotes and a story reflecting so much of what can go dangerously wrong when claims of performative emotional trauma trump facts, reality and the actual harm to actual human beings, this is one of those rare breed of “must read” articles that inexplicably made it past the editors to see daylight. Read it now, as it may well disappear when the NYT staff inform Sulzberger that it threatens their safety to have facts published in the newspaper.

This is a tale of how race, class and power collided at the elite 145-year-old liberal arts college, where tuition, room and board top $78,000 a year and where the employees who keep the school running often come from working-class enclaves beyond the school’s elegant wrought iron gates. The story highlights the tensions between a student’s deeply felt sense of personal truth and facts that are at odds with it.

At the time Smith “rising sophomore” Oumou Kanoute took to Facebook to tell her “deeply felt sense of personal truth” about “eating while Black,” at the expense of a janitor, who did nothing more than his entirely proper job, and a cafeteria worker who had nothing to do with it but whose pic Kanoute posted on Facebook as the Smith College “racist.”

The ACLU became involved to save the day.

BREAKING: Smith College has agreed to implement our recommendations for campus policing reforms.

We intervened after an employee called the cops on student Oumou Kanoute for looking “out of place” as she ate lunch on campus.https://t.co/XLYm6VpBT2

— ACLU (@ACLU) January 30, 2019

The only problem is that the cries of racism existed only in Kanoute’s imagination, while the harm to those she falsely accused, the ones who combined didn’t earn enough to pay for a year’s tuition at this “elite” college, were the victims of the Facebook mob. Not that the ACLU saw any problem with that.

But Oumou felt anything but welcome on that late July afternoon. As she ate in a common room, wearing the unofficial Smithie uniform of athleisure clothing topped with a pink-and-white Vineyard Vines cap, a college employee decided she looked “out of place” and called the campus police on her.

Except the cops weren’t called because she “looked out of place,” but because she was out of place. In a room where no one was supposed to be, allowed to be. The janitor was instructed to make sure the room wasn’t used, and if it was, to have campus police address the situation. They did, it went smoothly but for Kanoute’s personal trauma at not being allowed to do whatever she wanted. If this sounds familiar, there’s a lot involved that sounds remarkably similar to Yale’s Sarah Braasch’s story when she was falsely accused in the infamous “napping while black” story.

But surely the ACLU, once the facts became known in a report prepared by a law firm for Smith that cleared the workers and showed that the cries of racism were a product of a fertile imagination and excess of entitlement, would recognize that it was using its legal clout to pursue a lie at the expense of the less powerful, albeit white, workers? Nah.

Rahsaan Hall, racial justice director for the A.C.L.U. of Massachusetts and Ms. Kanoute’s lawyer, cautioned against drawing too much from the investigative report, as subconscious bias is difficult to prove. Nor was he particularly sympathetic to the accused workers.

“It’s troubling that people are more offended by being called racist than by the actual racism in our society,” he said. “Allegations of being racist, even getting direct mailers in their mailbox, is not on par with the consequences of actual racism.”

This rationalization offers a great insight into the workings of the unduly passionate mind. It’s not just idiotic sophistry, but a comparison between actual harm done real people with some existential sense of societal racism. How dare the employees concern themselves with their lives destroyed by some privileged if black lies and cries when there is racism floating around out there somewhere?

Does it really trouble the ACLU lawyer that people should be “offended” at their lives being destroyed for something that they didn’t do, that never actually happened, when there is “actual racism in our society”?

Yet, Smith College’s president, Kathleen McCartney, couldn’t capitulate to the ACLU’s demands hard enough. Among her prostrations were “White Accountability” training sessions for staff. But for the cafeteria worker, who had nothing to do with any of this and yet inexplicably was held out, pic and all, as a racist on Facebook by Kanoute, that wasn’t enough.

Smith officials pressured Ms. Blair to go into mediation with Ms. Kanoute. “A core tenet of restorative justice,” Ms. McCartney wrote, “is to provide people with the opportunity for willing apology, forgiveness and reconciliation.”

Ms. Blair declined. “Why would I do this? This student called me a racist and I did nothing,” she said.

It’s unlikely that McCartney expected mediation to result in Kaoute’s apologizing to her victim, Blair. But this story ends with a Coda worth knowing.

This past autumn the university furloughed her and other workers, citing the coronavirus and the empty dorms. Ms. Blair applied for an hourly job with a local restaurant. The manager set up a Zoom interview, she said, and asked her: “‘Aren’t you the one involved in that incident?’”

“I was pissed,” she said. “I told her I didn’t do anything wrong, nothing. And she said, ‘Well, we’re all set.’”

What are the chances the ACLU will take up Blair’s cause of being just another “actual” victim of racism? There was a racist at Smith. It was the person the ACLU chose to represent.