Image 01 Image 03

NY Times reveals the devastation after Smith College capitulated to a false claim of racism

NY Times reveals the devastation after Smith College capitulated to a false claim of racism

“Faculty members pointed to a pattern that they say reflects the college’s growing timidity in the face of allegations from students, especially around the issue of race and ethnicity.”

https://www.aclu.org/blog/racial-justice/race-and-criminal-justice/smith-college-employee-called-police-me-eating-lunch

For several months we have been covering the story of Jodi Shaw, a now-resigned Smith College staff member who blew the whistle on racist “anti-racist” training which singled out and demonized “whites”.

When Shaw first told her story publicly, she emphasized an incident of a false allegation of racism lodged against Smith College staff members. We wrote about that in our very first post about Shaw, Smith College whistleblower hits campus Critical Race Theory indoctrination: “Stop reducing my personhood to a racial category”:

Shaw alludes to the fact that she or her colleagues have been mistreated by students, and Smith College has either encouraged or permitted this behavior, stating, “And, I think we all know what I’m talking about.”

Shaw appears to be referring to a 2018 incident, where a black student accused a custodial staff member of racism for calling Campus Police. The staff member eventually was exonerated, as Inside Higher Ed reported:

Smith College released a report Monday detailing an independent investigation into a July call to campus police and rejecting the idea that the caller was motivated by clear racial bias. During the call, a Smith College custodial employee reported a black student who was eating lunch and relaxing in the Tyler House residence hall living room. The student “seems to be out of place,” the caller told the dispatcher.

Repeatedly in later interviews and videos, Smith emphasized the importance of that 2018 incident in what followed in her own story.

The incident involved a student backed by the ACLU legal and public relations behemoth, which published her story, A Smith College Employee Called the Police on Me for Eating Lunch While Black.

Smith College agreed to change its campus policies in response, as the ACLU gleefully announced:

Today Smith College announced that it’s overhauling two key sets of policies involving calls to campus police. Both changes largely mirror the ACLU’s recommendations, and had they been in place last year, it is likely that Oumou would never have suffered the shame and trauma of an unnecessary police encounter.

But as we indicated in our first post about Shaw, an exhaustive outside investigation cleared the staff members. It was a racism hoax, a false narrative that fed into an national narrative and altered the policies of Smith College.

But it did a lot more. I didn’t fully appreciate the devastation caused by that false allegation of racism on the working-class staff members until an investigation recently released by The NY Times, Inside a Battle Over Race, Class and Power at Smith College.

I was going to write about it last night, but as I read through the investigation, I found it hard to concentrate — the evil perpetrated at many levels of Smith College brought up a lot of emotions of what I’ve witnessed and have been shared with me about life on campuses. We have covered many of these cases in which false allegations of racism are weaponized as a power play to bring professors, fellow students, and administrations to their knees. It is a powerplay unfolding with increasing vindictiveness.

There are stories shared with me and of which I have knowledge which are not public, but reflect this campaign of intimidation being waged. Reading the Times story brought forth all those emotions and frustration.

The gravamen of the Times story is how Smith College, particularly its president Kathleen McCartney, sacrificed staff to appease the accuser without waiting for the investigation to conclude. That damage was compounded when, after the investigative report, the staff received no apologies. Instead, Smith College launched the abusive so-called “anti-racist” training sessions for staff of which Shaw has complained.

Please, read the whole Times article. It’s infuriating. The Times details how the lives of several working class staff members were destroyed by this false claim of “eating while black.”

Here’s a very short excerpt on the substance of what happened in the aftermath of the investigative report:

Less attention was paid three months later when a law firm hired by Smith College to investigate the episode found no persuasive evidence of bias. Ms. Kanoute was determined to have eaten in a deserted dorm that had been closed for the summer; the janitor had been encouraged to notify security if he saw unauthorized people there. The officer, like all campus police, was unarmed.
Smith College officials emphasized “reconciliation and healing” after the incident. In the months to come they announced a raft of anti-bias training for all staff, a revamped and more sensitive campus police force and the creation of dormitories — as demanded by Ms. Kanoute and her A.C.L.U. lawyer — set aside for Black students and other students of color.

But they did not offer any public apology or amends to the workers whose lives were gravely disrupted by the student’s accusation.

* * *

Those tensions come at a time when few in the Smith community feel comfortable publicly questioning liberal orthodoxy on race and identity, and some professors worry the administration is too deferential to its increasingly emboldened students.
“My perception is that if you’re on the wrong side of issues of identity politics, you’re not just mistaken, you’re evil,” said James Miller, an economics professor at Smith College and a conservative.

In an interview, Ms. McCartney said that Ms. Kanoute’s encounter with the campus staff was part of a spate of cases of “living while Black” harassment across the nation. There was, she noted, great pressure to act. “We always try to show compassion for everyone involved,” she said.

* * *

On Oct. 28, 2018, Ms. McCartney released a 35-page report from a law firm with a specialty in discrimination investigations. The report cleared Ms. Blair altogether and found no sufficient evidence of discrimination by anyone else involved, including the janitor who called campus police.

Still, Ms. McCartney said the report validated Ms. Kanoute’s lived experience, notably the fear she felt at the sight of the police officer. “I suspect many of you will conclude, as did I,” she wrote, “it is impossible to rule out the potential role of implicit racial bias.”

The report said Ms. Kanoute could not point to anything that supported the claim she made on Facebook of a yearlong “pattern of discrimination.”

Ms. McCartney offered no public apology to the employees after the report was released. “We were gobsmacked — four people’s lives wrecked, two were employees of more than 35 years and no apology,” said Tracey Putnam Culver, a Smith graduate who recently retired from the college’s facilities management department. “How do you rationalize that?”

Tucker Carlson had a good two-part segment on the NY Times report and what happened (here and here).

Yet there was a part of the Times article that honed in on the problem and has received relatively little attention. But it goes to the heart of the problem, the capitulation of administrators to those who make accusations:

Faculty members, however, pointed to a pattern that they say reflects the college’s growing timidity in the face of allegations from students, especially around the issue of race and ethnicity. In 2016, students denounced faculty at Smith’s social work program as racist after some professors questioned whether admissions standards for the program had been lowered and this was affecting the quality of the field work. Dennis Miehls, one of the professors they decried, left the school not long after.

Then in the autumn of 2019, the religious studies department proposed a class on Native American religion and spirituality. A full complement of students registered but well before classes began, a small contingent of Native American students and allies pasted bright red posters on buildings on campus reviling the course as harmful, intrusive and disrespectful and attacking the instructor, who was young, white and not on a tenure track. He had an academic background in this field and had modeled his course on that of his mentor, who was a well-known professor and a member of the Choctaw Nation.

The administration declined to challenge the student protesters and had the instructor submit to sessions of “radical listening” with the protesters. In the end, the religious studies department dropped the class.

The whole scenario of what went down at Smith is a sorry commentary on how deeply corrupted so many college and university administrations have become — rather than follow the evidence and seek the truth, they seek the expediency. But capitulation to untruths never improves the situation. It only encourages more intimidation.

 

DONATE

Donations tax deductible
to the full extent allowed by law.

Comments

Following Oberlin’s path…good and hard

Why would The New York Times publish something true about a hate hoax?

I’m not joking. You know what The Times has become. Most of them are certifiable, while the rest are sociopaths and cowards. To report truthfully about a hate hoax conflicts with their most sacred religious dogmas. I wonder how the article got published.

    healthguyfsu in reply to Dantzig93101. | February 25, 2021 at 10:32 pm

    If you read the article, they didn’t dispel it as a hoax at all. They gave it enough due to capitulate to the egocentric race hustlers, who will still decry it as too humanizing to the other side.

    One person even is quoted in there as saying that death threats in one’s mailbox are justified because they aren’t near as harmful as this invisible racism they keep crying about.

      SpeakUpNow in reply to healthguyfsu. | February 26, 2021 at 1:50 pm

      Yes I read the painful story…. Nowhere does the reporter use the word “lie.” Don’t you know, it is her “personal truth.” I’d love to use that phrase if I ever have to testify. So the new Orwellian term for a lie by a member of the African American race is a “personal truth.” They are so d–n inventive!

Traditional America is seeing it proved over and over — authority is spineless, and bullies win.
When we finally decide to embrace that lesson, God help those same authorities.

I want this whole garbage destructive propaganda war to die a rapid death.

Like Shelby Steele has said, liberal white guilt and race hustlers. A toxic combo that creates the anti-racist cult of the woke religion.

    MORE THAN THAT
    Any consumer-oriented business is vulnerable to what is effectively extortion. There is “implicit extortion”. It goes like this: “Do what we want or we will smear you in the media as a racist.” FBI should be investigating BLM under RICO statutes. Very few targets have the guts to fight. They know that if they do they will almost certainly be ruined. My guess is that most of the targets of this extortion are smart enough to know what’s really happening – but powerless to stop it alone. That’s why the only way to fight this is as a group. People must unite to push back.

This nation will not “heal” until everyone stops looking at skin color.

Everyone.

    DaveGinOly in reply to navyvet. | February 26, 2021 at 2:51 pm

    Someone criticized Trump for being “racially insensitive.” Wasn’t that MLK’s ideal for equality in America, for everyone to not consider race when judging and evaluating the actions of others or their personal worth as human beings? What the criticism actually meant was that Trump didn’t pay enough attention to race when considering the value of others. (And, naturally, expected a positive evaluation of any POC based solely on their status as a POC.)

Dear President McCartney; The nature of the human soul is, lol, global: yet also, universal immaterial individual personal free invisible unchanging indivisible, colorless indestructible odorless immortal eternal invisible indestructible male or female, seat of wisdom, will and love; wounded.

What is ‘baseless’ but a virtue signaling nytimes and wapo word of the day. Mccartney might explain her religious upbringing and current defensive posture vis a vis ‘racism’ and the nature of the soul.. How about anti-Catholic bias, lol?

When the hell did we give the students the authority to run the colleges? Since when do the inmates run the asylum??

So-called “anti-racism” is but one piece in the broader jigsaw puzzle of the woke religious cult – and make no mistake: it IS a religion, complete with dogma which shall not be questioned, rituals which must be performed, gods which must be appeased, confession of sins which must be made often and extensively, and indulgences available for purchase so the rich can continue in the pet sins that they decry in the unwashed masses. Heretics of this woke religion get branded with a scarlet H and are summarily excommunicated/canceled without even being informed of the nature of their transgressions, much less being granted an appeal.

Other aspects of this woke religion, dogma which shall not be questioned, include leftist politics, socialism (which of course is merely communism being slow-walked), greenie weenie environmentalism and apocalyptic “global climate change,” the radical LBGTQIAXYZPDQ agenda, “covid” (or whatever the current weaponized pretext happens to be) authoritarianism and coerced vaxxes, gun confiscation, crushing debt and ever-increasing levels of taxation…you get the idea. Question ANY of these tenets and you’ll be branded a hater, a XYZ-phobe, a science denier, a granny-killer, a Nazi worse than Hitler – in short, a mouth-breathing troglodyte not fit to live, let alone be allowed to show your face in “polite society.”

So the obvious solution is excommunication, deplatforming, unpersoning…quarantining you and stifling your voice of dissent lest you infect others with your damnable heresy.

If they haven’t come for you yet, rest assured that they WILL come for you sooner or later. I am about as easy-to-get-along-with and fair-minded as they come… but I will not back down from my facts-based viewpoints, and I’m not going to say that 2 + 2 = 5 even if the WHO, the CDC, and other “experts” are gaslighting me. So today I had the honor of getting kicked off of Linked In because I stuck to my guns about posting FACTS regarding PCR tests. That was sufficient for the truth-allergic drones at LI to kick me off, with no chance of appeal (perhaps) unless I go back groveling. Not going to happen. It has only steeled my resolve to resist the leftist madness that is disproportionally loud in today’s society.

The more the woke morons pull this kind of crap, the more we “regular Joes” are going put our foot down and refuse to go along. If there is war, it will be because THEY have started it. You can poke a bear for only so long before you find out your arm is missing below your elbow – and it’s your own damn fault for being stupid enough to keep poking the bear in the first place.

    DaveGinOly in reply to nordic_prince. | February 26, 2021 at 2:54 pm

    “…let alone (not) be allowed to show your face in ‘polite society.'”

    Oddly, this is literally true. Right now, in many state, nobody is allowed to show their faces in public.

This isn’t really a hoax, it’s a misunderstanding. The student genuinely assumed she’d been racially profiled, because that’s what she expects to happen. She assumed that had she been white the janitor would not have been suspicious and would not have called the cops. The investigation found that the janitor didn’t even know what race she was, because s/he couldn’t see her properly.

    nordic_prince in reply to Milhouse. | February 26, 2021 at 9:02 am

    So in other words, she had a chip on her shoulder – whitey’s out to get her. Gee, I wonder who taught her that….

    DaveGinOly in reply to Milhouse. | February 26, 2021 at 2:58 pm

    This is what happens to cops who are accused of targeting black motorists who are initially pursued with the cop having no knowledge of the driver’s race. Because the first thing a cop is supposed to notice when a car flashes past at over 100mph in the dark of night is the race of the driver. In which case he is apparently expected to not initiate the pursuit at all.

    UserP in reply to Milhouse. | February 26, 2021 at 3:04 pm

    She posted names and pictures of two staff (Ms Blair and Mr Patenaude) on the internet and accused them being racist, one of whom was hospitalized with stress, and knew nothing about the incident, and another janitor who was not at work at the time at the time of the incident, was forced from his job. It was a hoax because neither of them had anything to do it.

    Ms. Kanoute wrote a Facebook post: “It’s outrageous that some people question my being at Smith, and my existence overall as a woman of color.” That was a hoax because no one questioned her being at Smith and no one questioned her existence as a woman of color.

      UserP in reply to UserP. | February 26, 2021 at 4:33 pm

      “It’s outrageous that some people question my being at Smith, and my existence overall as a woman of color.”

      Why would anyone question her being at Smith? Black students are quite common at Smith and there are over 100 according to the college website. In fact, whites are less that half of the student population at 49.5%.

    slither in reply to Milhouse. | February 26, 2021 at 7:30 pm

    I might have partially agreed with you before I watched the videos. But no. In one video she tearfully claims she was eating in the dining hall and was told she was “out of place”. She then shows a segment of a video she herself edited deceptively. In another, she claims she was in the common room, again being deceptive.

    And she also doxed innocent people.

    No, this is a hoax. What’s amazing is that she wasn’t held accountable, even after the facts were known.

    Frank Hammond in reply to Milhouse. | February 26, 2021 at 9:00 pm

    Another idiotic comment by the group of paid trollers known as Milhouse – are you guys getting $20 per post? The Chicago Reader was advertising $16 per troll during the election.

    JusticeDelivered in reply to Milhouse. | February 27, 2021 at 8:17 pm

    In other words, the way she feels is more important then the truth.

    I think it likely that she is another dim wit Affirmative incompetent in training. Regardless, her conduct is antisocial, unjust and completely unacceptable.

      Milhouse in reply to JusticeDelivered. | March 1, 2021 at 6:19 pm

      No, this is what she assumed to be the truth, because it’s what she expected to happen. We’re all like that, to some extent, eager to confirm our assumptions instead of first trying to find out what actually happened.

In a rare moment of journalism, the NY Times reports…

Connivin Caniff | February 26, 2021 at 11:07 am

These people are evil, and with sociopathic traits, plain and simple. Zero empathy, even after being shown they were totally incorrect.

Here’s the thing… The students are being taught this by faculty. 18 year old kids don’t just show up on campus ready to organize and protest. Faculty members are organizing them and teaching them that this false reality is real.

The administrations are either complicit, or too afraid of their own staff to show effective leadership.

Ms. McCartney said the report validated Ms. Kanoute’s lived experience, notably the fear she felt at the sight of the police officer.
_________________

Kanoute’s “lived experience” was that of an entitled, upper-class brat who had come to Smith from an exclusive private school. This nasty little racist wasn’t some black tribeswoman from some war-torn African nation. She was a person whose “lived experience” was one of wealth and privilege in the U.S., where she had likely never encountered any real racism, but was probably eager to do so, so that she could claim her “victim” status.

It’s sickening how these leftists morons always rush to make excuses for the blatant lies of the black race-hustlers.

    DaveGinOly in reply to Observer. | February 26, 2021 at 2:59 pm

    If she had been from some war-torn African nation, she would have been amazed at the civility of the officer and would have thanked her stars she’s in America.

Lost me at “ny times”.

Kinda like losing me at: “sandy smollet says…”

Concerning the class on Native American religious and spiritual beliefs that was dropped because of Native American students’ complaints. How long do you think it will be before this same block complains about the lack of such a course at Smith?

What a nasty piece of work she is.

My alma mater quietly let it be known that after a nationally reported incident, the students involved in further agitation will be the ones investigated first. Including their emails, contacts with outside groups and student/faculty interviews in private. And students found to have lied, broken campus rules, hoaxed, or are otherwise at fault should find another school because they will not graduate/ Now my college is heavy STEM..but has a national presence in graduate schools as it has the second or so highest number of graduates also getting a higher degree. Perhaps the first.

There have been no further incidents and applications are sky-rocketing.

Racial hoaxes like this are becoming common at colleges and universities, and the colleges of the Five College Consortium (Amherst, Smith, Hampshire, Mt. Holyoke and UMASS Amherst) are far from any exception.

It is not just them. Westfield State College in Westfield, MA, about 10-15 miles from Smith, has had several “racial incidents” perpetrated by black students, to “draw attention to racism etc.” as claimed by the perpetrators. Innumerable remedial racism seminars later, everyone is on pins and needles, and the gender and race studies department continues to grow.

So there isn’t enough racism to support your premise, so you create it to support said premise.

Got it.