You’ve got me wrong if you think I ever make requests to silence anyone on this board. I thought I made that clear in my previous post. I’m content for you to carry on in your present vein. And of course it’s you who are calling for me to be silenced, just as you continue to make derogatory personal insinuations I would never dream of making about you. I judge people by the content of their character. As it happens I once marched with Martin Luther King through a howling and violent mob in Chicago - so I believe I have the right to make that reference.
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I can’t tell if you’re being serious with this comment.
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Another MLK quote that I think relevant to the thread and personally impactful is the following…
“It may be true that morality cannot be legislated, but behavior can be regulated. It may be true that the law cannot change the heart but it can restrain the heartless. It may be true that the law can’t make a man love me, but it can restrain him from lynching me, and I think that’s pretty important also.”
Human behavior towards race can be regulated in a number of ways. Carrot vs stick, discourse, personal experience and familiarity to name a few.
It appears there is a near universal view across this thread that the likelihood of an innocent black student having the police called on them at Smith has been lessened.
Some view this as making the community more dangerous and think employee fear of recrimination will be the cause. Regardless, I view that change in behavior as progress as I still support Blackstone’s theory of justice.
Personally the incident and this thread have served to ensure I would no longer just take a moments pause and just contemplate my circumstances before calling the police but consider the potential impact upon the person I would be reporting.
America today still faces many of the challenges faced during MLKs America, but behaviors are changing. This thread is contentious and uncomfortable but worth the effort in my opinion.
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I am certainly serious. I couldn’t live with myself if I lied about a thing like that or brought it up for the petty purpose of scoring points or adding strength to an argument. I mention it now only in response to the attack on my character. Of course I might still have done such a thing in my youth and become a loathesome creature thereafter.
Thank you for locating this and sharing it with us. Words need to be backed by actions, but it’s nice to see the goal SC is aiming for. I’d feel comfortable sending my kids to SC.
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Without calling into question your motives (because I don’t think they matter), do you even realize how insulting and condescending it is for you to suggest that the problem here is that this student didn’t write this off as an “innocent misunderstanding?”
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After following this thread I am grateful that neither of my kids even considered Smith College. But I am happy for any who do.
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If someone’s behavior was intended to be race-neutral but pain is still felt, then what do we do?
IMHO, this is the basic disconnect. In addition to the fact that we only rarely ever are granted that cinematic moment of clarity of a person’s true inner dialogue, there’s a little more going on here than just “janitor guilty/not guilty” of a racial offense.
I’m not going to go back through the entire thread and start poking at particular people. That said, I think part of what is going on here is a reaction to what some perceive (rightly in my opinion) as tortured efforts by others to make this a clear-cut “nothing to see here” issue as it relates to the Smith student while at the same time hanging Smith and focusing almost entirely on the student’s missteps. “What does she want? Why did she do this? Why did she do that? Well, she shouldn’t have been there.” You don’t have to be Colombo to figure out that this student’s experiences as a black person is of zero consequence to a handful of people here, which is hardly surprising. There’s just no recognition of subtlety or nuance to anything, and even the slightest concession to the most obvious of points is met with “but but but.”
I don’t know the particulars of those “other calls” involving white students, and it doesn’t seem like anyone else here does either. I also don’t know what was on the janitor’s mind, consciously or otherwise. He saw a black person from a distance occupying a closed-off space on a campus where students being in the wrong place happens literally all of the time, and called the police. My hunch - and only a hunch - is that he thought it was a man and didn’t want to deal with it. I would bet a lot of money that if he knew it was a student he’d have walked over and handled it. In my view, his behavior was unreasonable as applied to any person, and there’s nothing wrong with acknowledging the added complications involved when you add in the fact that the woman was black. In these circumstances I would not have fired him; but I would have talked to him about using better judgement. It was a lazy call-in as likely as not influenced by racial stereotype.
If the thread had gone in a different direction, we might not have seen the vitriol we have here. “Totally understand the student’s frustration here and the tough spot Smith was put in with the employee’s actions, but you can’t hang the guy with what we know here. An unconscious bias class for staff is a good step to take, but that should be the extent of it.” I think you get a different reaction with that kind of take.
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I agree with this 100%. Every bit of it.
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We seem to have glossed over the most relevant historical fact in my opinion:
Only 6% of Smith students are black while 15% of students who had the police called on them in error were black.
It would be impossible not to suspect race was a factor if you are black and had the police called on you in error. The student was completely justified based upon her actions and history.
It seems entirely disingenuous to suggest black kids sleep in closed areas or act “out of place” at a 2-1 ratio versus their population. Consequently their Smith experience during this period included having the cops called on them twice as often as their campus presence when being “students while black”.
She didn’t jump to that conclusion. Her experience and that of other black people on campus allowed her being reported as further proof of what she already had witnessed to be the cultural norm on campus at the time.
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You might have done those things in your youth, continue to rail against overt racism, and still not completely understand that systematic and subconscious racism is still very much still a problem. My question about your seriousness comes from your use of “I marched with MLK so I can speak with authority” and invoking the obvious MLK quote often used by those who want to throw the man’s words back in the community’s face.
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As I thought I made clear, Splash, having marched with King gives me no greater authority than anyone else to comment on any of these matters. I believe in argument and have no use for bringing in personal experience as a trump card. I have had many arguments on this board in which I could have played that card if that was my intention. No, the sole purpose of making mention of it now was in defence of my character. Any reading of the context ought to make that clear.
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But wouldn’t it be simpler if we just declare that racism doesn’t exist because most people are well-intentioned?
While we are at it, we might as well also pretend that the janitor must have judged the 5’2" black female to be a suspicious threat because of “the content of her character.”
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That is not what that statistic says. Of the 47 calls that involved a description of race, 15% were about African-Americans. NOT necessarily students, and not necessarily Smith students as students from other campuses can be on Smith’s campus. Visitors, town residents, staff can all be the subject of the calls, and aren’t limited to the 6% of African American Smith students.
It also doesn’t say all those 15% were in error. Some may have been legitimate calls where assistance was needed.
The stats also don’t tell who is making the calls. Are they from staff, students, faculty, visitors to the school? Are the callers all white? Is it still racial profiling if the caller is black and the subject is also black?
In this case, the security officer originally thought the call was about an elderly white man in the parking lot (clearly not a Smith student). If that had proven true, this call would have been logged in another category by the law firm reviewing the records but still counted as a call to security.
Ms. K had her feelings about the incident and had every right to bring it to Smith’s attention. It doesn’t matter if others would shrug off the same events as she experienced distress after this event. Her feelings, her experience. She wanted some action or corrections taken. Where I do have an issue is her posting on social media before she knew all the facts, including posting the incorrect officer’s name and photo. Would she have done that if a black officer had responded or if it were a black cafeteria worker? Does she have racial issues with white staff? Smith College also had an issue with her ‘naming names’ and requested she remove them from the social media post.
And I have a lot of trouble understanding that another student called the cafeteria worker a racist and that worker was subject to that harassment with no report of Smith doing anything to protect her. How is that acceptable? Was that student (or others) required to do diversity training? That, to me, indicates Smith College does have an issue with staff, as the title to this thread originally asked, as it isn’t protecting staff while they are at their jobs.
Has anything changed after the diversity training 3 years ago? Are their fewer calls involving race to the security officers? Are there fewer calls about innocent situations or are they still at 90% ‘not suspicious’? If so, what should be done? Maybe nothing needs to be done. Maybe the security office is happy with the number of calls it receives, feels it is defusing any situation before it becomes worse, has the right balance of ‘good’ calls to ‘unnecessary’ calls.
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You make an excellent point that actually suggests a likely further disproportionate over representation of calls being made on black people. Thank you.
While Smith is approx 6% black and Wellesley 7% black the town of Northampton Mass is only 2.7% black and the vast majority of employees are from the surrounding communities. Hampshire county has a black population of 3.4%.
So simple question why are 15% of calls being made to report blacks when the entire community on campus is likely closer to sub 5%?
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The lawyers considered this and they understood it would be a mistake of drawing conclusions from a very small sample set. I give the lawyers credit here, as most non-math people would jump to the same conclusion you did. But somewhere along the way, they were trained on statistical validity.
As a very quick example, if you toss a coin 10 times, the expected value is 5 heads, but a third of the time you end up with 7+ heads or 7+ tails, pretty far from the expected value . That doesn’t mean the coin is unfair.
This is very unlike the situation of “driving while black”. There, the pattern of discrimination is clear based upon extensive arrest records.
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I think lawyers have given up doing math. My friend’s daughter has a degree in applied mathematics from Colorado School of Mines and has work for a law firm for 5 years; I think she does calculations like this for them all the time. I really didn’t understand why they needed a mathematician, but I guess it is for things like this.
I’m guessing, but I think most of the calls to campus security are for security doors when someone gets locked in a building after hours and triggers an alarm, or there are people talking too loudly in a parking lot under an open window or just ‘looking suspicious’ in that lot. Are some of those local hs kids? (looking for beer?) Sure. Boys from other colleges coming to visit and not wanting to come in the front door, kids getting locked out and trying to get into the building. Truly minor stuff, but in the post 9/11 world, everything is reported. Are some of the students locked in or out or in the parking lots minorities? Of course.
I’m guessing again, but I think the janitor called because he thought it was a male in the lounge. The building was supposed to be empty, he called and then ‘guarded’ the stairs to the upper levels. If he knew it was a student, he might have told her the building was closed for the summer and asked her to pack up. Not racial but maybe gender discrimination - he didn’t want to deal with a man.
So am I correct to assume you fully appreciate and understand why the non quant student in this incident would view it as racially driven?
Given how small the black community is at these schools, I am sure she had heard of others who had the police called on them. So as she is sitting eating her lunch in an area that her id card gave access to, and is confronted in a manner by an employee that the police officer describes as “impolite” and told she looks out of place, it seems logical she would conclude race was a contributing factor.
I hope that we not now pivoting to a standard that suggests she was wrong not to have shrugged it off because her math skills were insufficient to recognize the small sample size of her experience?
I agree with Twoinanddone’s comment below…
“Ms. K had her feelings about the incident and had every right to bring it to Smith’s attention. It doesn’t matter if others would shrug off the same events as she experienced distress after this event. Her feelings, her experience. She wanted some action or corrections taken. Where I do have an issue is her posting on social media before she knew all the facts, including posting the incorrect officer’s”name and photo.”
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I am fully sympathetic to her reaction, right up to the point of doxxing others.
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You give the lawyers way too much credit. They didn’t apply any sort of rigorous “statistical validity” analysis. One year they eyeballed it, and the next year they ignored it.
But setting that aside I am confused by your use of this data. Haven’t you been using this same small dataset to support your conclusions that nothing discriminatory happened here?
For example . . .
and . . .
. . . and then there is the question you posed in post 285, the premise of which was that this data showed there was no discrimination.
. . . and then there was your earlier hypothetical where you again used this dataset (after alteration) to support a premise that there was no discrimination.
As one of those “non-math people” maybe I just don’t get it, but it seems like your “validity standard” is highly subjective.
Do we really need a new dataset consisting of “extensive records” proving racial profiling for every situation? Do you honestly believe that the odds of this happening to a non-black person are the same as it happening to a black person?
If not, then what is this all about? Why endlessly parse statistics when we all know that this happens more to black people than it does to non-black people?
Speaking of extensive records, doesn’t 400 years of race relations in America play some role in informing out understanding the reality these situations.
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