Does Smith College have a toxic atmosphere towards staff employees?

Colleges and Universities A-Z Smith College
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@twoinanddone, I’m sorry, but I’m not going to continue to debate those items. My parenthetical comments are based on a careful reading of the law firm report, and have already been explained in previous posts. To my mind, continuing to dwell on this stuff only serves to distract and deflect from the core issues: This shouldn’t have happened. The student did nothing to justify having the police called on her, and had every reason to feel victimized, racially profiled, scared and scarred.

If you or others disagree with this, then we’ll have to agree to disagree.

@CateCAParent, thanks for your kind words. I found it a complex topic address, and your previous post helped me to better understand what I wanted to say.

Based on what we know, I agree about the officer. Further, as @Catcherinthetoast pointed out, the officer’s comments were very helpful in understanding what happened. IMO the officer cut through much of what I consider distraction and really focused on the humanity of the situation and the harmlessness of the student’s actions, and that may have been overlooked had this particular officer not been involved. Really, a lot could have gone wrong had this particular officer not been involved.

While he handled the situation well, his comments did leave me thinking that he probably had some additional thoughts on why the call was made, but didn’t articulate them. That is probably what he is trained to do, but it may be worth considering that he was sort of stuck in the middle here, and while he was sympathetic to the student’s situation, he also seemed sympathetic to the older, hard of hearing employee. Both during his interaction with the student and in his interview he was was very delicate with his descriptions, as if he knew they were on thin ice, and he was just trying to get everyone off it before it broke.

It’s an admirable approach to managing a potential crisis, but the unintended consequence may have made it easier to sweep the incident under the rug, and that isn’t necessarily a good thing. That’s a lot of speculation here on my part, but you asked. And like I said I thought he handled it well, but it might be worth considering that even his best intentioned and most thoughtful actions may have had unintended consequences.

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Thank you @mtmind for this, as I kept thinking about it, and it helped distill in my mind why I had such a strong reaction to this situation.

Summarizing what I written previously, I am a POC who grew up in a deeply conservative state with very few other POC around me. In my grade, I was the only person of my race, although there were a small number of others in the town of other ages. And as I said, most of the people in town were like the Smith staff. Their children were my classmates and friends.

People often ask me how much racism I encountered growing up in such an environment, and are surprised when I say “not much”. I find that most people are not racists at heart. They may make mistakes, but most are willing to learn.

As you might guess, race relations is extraordinarily important to me. I look at the increasing racism in this country and am concerned about what this means for the future safety of my children.

To put this in simple and stark terms, if enough of the population turns against people who look like me, it’s game over for my family. Ten years ago if you asked if such a scenario was possible, I would have said “of course not”. Today, that scenario is unlikely but potentially possible. But it certainly has happened many times in history in what seemed like stable societies.

To me a fundamental truth about improving race relations is that you convert people to your side through spending time with them, listening to their view, providing explanations of your view, and importantly, a forgiveness for unintentional mistakes.

On the other hand, if you want to take people who were neutral and harden their opinion against you, you do that by unfairly accusing some of them of racism, and by severely punishing them for unintentional lapses of judgment. It’s a huge mistake thinking that you can bludgeon racism out of people, but you can certainly bludgeon them towards it.

If you were to ask me for a playbook on how to turn hundreds of people against racial harmony, I actually can’t imagine a better one than the one that Ms. Kanoute and Smith’s president put together here. Honestly, it would make for a great Harvard Business Case on how NOT to do things.

To illustrate, before she was fired, do you really think Jackie Blair was going to just say “No problem that Ms Kanoute falsely accused me of being a racist. Let me find out if I really was one without knowing by undergoing sensitivity training.”

To the people who think that Ms Kanoute having to unfairly spend a few minutes of time with a security guard is more damaging to a Smith staff member than stress from lupus, losing your job and being unable to find another one due to a false accusation, I ask: Are you nuts?

And having seen what has happened to their colleagues, do you really think that the Smith staff is going to be open to sensitivity training that only targets them and not the faculty as well?

What’s sad to me is that every bit of this was avoidable, by supporting both the student AND the staff.

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@hebegebe I think you have a woeful lack of understanding about anti-Black racism, and racism in general - one large piece being the idea that racism has gotten worse over the last 10 years. It hasn’t. An in-depth look and research into historical racism shows pretty clearly that racism has been part and parcel of our society for very long time and often literally deadly to those who are affected (Slavery, Jim Crow, Chinese Exclusion Act, Japanese Internment camps, Civil Rights Struggle, Lynchings, Assassinations of Black leaders: King, Malcolm X, Hampton, Voting suppression, Poll taxes, Red-Lining, GI Bill benefits only for whites, War on Drugs, Housing Discrimination, the gutting of the VRA in 2013, Crisis on the Border, Blue Lives Matter, the election of Donald Trump). That incredibly underreported list of racism basically gets us from the beginning of our country’s founding to present day without any time period within that there was not virulent anti-Black racism that often spilled over to non-Black minorities.

The only difference I have been able to see is that racism has gotten to be more difficult to ignore for more people, due in part to the ability for it to be broadcast more easily by individuals, and it being harder to be swept completely under the rug by state actors - oh yeah, George Floyd had a “cardiac event and officers provided medical care” - that was the first story out of MN last year. It would have been nice if the decades old Rodney King beating had convinced people that Black people can be severely over-punished by state actors, or 1980s Vincent Chin murder and the subsequent whitewashing of any real consequences to his murders meant that racism comes for all non-whites, even ‘model minorities’.

In recent times, white people clearly feel that it is socially acceptable to be more open with their racism. The quality has not changed and the ‘increase’, if there is some is that groups who thought they were not associated with Black people have found out that when the chips are down, they aren’t white either…and racism comes for everyone when anti-Black racism is tacitly/openly accepted/ignored/minimized.

The idea that anyone can be bludgeoned or embarrassed into being racist is absurd. I would suggest that if any of us argued you can create wife-beaters by telling men not to beat their wives/stop beating their wives, we would all scoff. That is literally what is being argued by saying calling out people on racist ideas, behavior or structures or telling them those ideas are wrong leads them to become racist.

It is not up to the oppressed to ask that their humanity be recognized by pleading nicely and keeping quiet. To paraphrase - being quiet only allows the oppressor to say you enjoyed their abuse.

I think @Econpop and @mtmind have done a really good job of asking everyone to think about what this discussion would have looked like had we centered the experience, consequences and emotions of the Black teenage girl who had the police called on her for eating lunch in a room with a closed door while Black. And tried, for just a moment, to think about what that little girl’s experience and emotions are and would be if you had been her, growing up in a country that has treated Black people the way our country has for over 400 years to have the police called for her, when she has done nothing wrong, when she has lived as a black person who has experience racism every day of her life, when she cannot afford to ignore the videos of innocent Black men, women and CHILDREN killed by the police, she cannot afford to ignore what it is like to live in a majority white state while she attends college, she literally never gets a break from being Black in America.

Asking her to be the one who has the responsibility to manage the situation, to control the consequences of the adults involved is wrong. She is the child, the one still learning how not only be Black in American as safely as possible but also be a Black adult in America.

She is not the one who should be the caretaker in this situation.

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After writing post 162, I realize that A) If my thoughts were clearer earlier in this thread, I would have written it earlier, and B) with less vitriol towards Ms Kanoute (but not towards Smith’s president who still deserves every bit of blame).

To me, writing post 162 was cathartic, and as a result, I don’t have much more to write about this topic. It represents my opinion of how the various groups should have been treated. But I will paraphrase what I said in a PM to another poster:

To me the problem with people advocating social justice is not in the quest for it, which I welcome, but that so many do it naively, winning a particular battle but losing the war. IMO, if in your quest to help an individual person you are turning hundreds more away, not only are you are doing it wrong, you are potentially making the community less stable.

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Best post on the topic,IMO.

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“Naive” to you. Others don’t see themselves as naive, but rather in a difference of opinion with you on what matters here. And there is a difference.

Sometimes you gotta kick a little a$$ to effect change when the status quo is entrenched. I’m sure the community in the southern US thought the trouble makers in the civil rights movement were risking community stability with their activities. Really, that’s exactly what they were doing. Every march, every act of civil disobedience, all of it stirred the pot and made the south an unstable and dangerous place to be. This kid was sticking up for herself for being harassed. She didn’t want to blow it off. Pretty simple point.

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That’s an impressive summation, MT, but a flawed one: it dismisses all key objections as irrelevant and decrees all observations other than its central one out of bounds. All human reality and complexity here is boiled down to your “core issue” - that a racist janitor inflected terrible harm on a young black woman. That makes for a simple narrative, and it serves to justify the President’s response of bringing in mandatory anti-racism training. It also permits you to dismiss the harms done to four innocent people. But let me pass over all that, sufficiently aired in prior posts, and go once again to the central action, your core issue, and ask you once again whether it matters to you what was in the mind of the janitor? If it doesn’t matter, or you can’t determine it, then how can you make this a morality tale about racism? And if the actions of the janitor weren’t inspired by racism, how can that justify the mobbing either of him or certainly the other innocent individuals here? And how can it justify the imposition of anti-racism training? An awful lot depends on knowing the answers to those questions.

You can tell me if you think I’ve got you wrong, but the logic of your position requires you to believe that either his motivation or his perception was racist. Of course the report didn’t reach that conclusion. Nor did it criticize him for calling in campus security; nor for determining that it was correct to check out the bona fides of someone out of place; nor that being in that area could constitute being out of place. You have to believe that his perception of race made all the difference here, that the call wouldn’t have been made but for that factor. And to reasonably hold that belief requires more than the bare statement that “he called the cops on her.” That’s ideology talking, not an attempt to understand a human event.

Let me give you an alternative construction of that event: Janitor sees person in closed-off area not in use at present by other students; thinks this deserves inquiry because person is “out of place”; notices person is black, but that’s not unusual - there are black kids at this school (and hardly any in town: that’s not what makes her out of place); prefers not to deal with situation himself because it could be unpleasant and not his job - that’s what security is for; knows that this option is permissible; calls it in; doesn’t mention race because no reason to - not relevant; friendly campus cop appears and does his job as it should be done. Case closed.

Of course I don’t know it happened that way any more than you know how it happened. I say only that my script is more plausible than yours. Yours does, however, make a better narrative, whatever the actual facts.

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I think this incident set back race relations on the Smith campus at least 10 years, probably more. I am certain it was not the intent, but it was the result, and results matter.

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Just curious about who has read the Woodson letter to Smith and your views on it? The civil rights movement is referenced in the letter .

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But what did she want? Did she want an explanation, an apology, everyone fired?

I really don’t have a problem with the training everyone was required to take (the school says faculty WAS required to take it). A lot of businesses have that kind of training required every year. When I volunteered at my kids’ grade school, we all had to take training and renew it every year. I always learned something new, especially when I thought about situations that had occurred during the prior years and how I handled them.

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Point of clarification. Yes, the school says faculty was required to take this. However, The NY Times wrote:

Apparently, nobody told this Smith professor it was required for him.

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At the risk of being that obnoxious person who won’t take sides, a couple of thoughts:

First, Sometimes using your indoor voice works better than your outdoor voice, and sometimes you have to yell at the top of your lungs to get the necessary attention. There is a time and place for both methods of persuasion. I for one wouldn’t be having this conversation at all right now but for people making it less comfortable to stay quiet than to face some tough questions. But at the same time, I don’t think so clearly when I am being yelled at. You want to change my mind about anything, though, I need a calm conversation with time for me to think.

Second, I can hold in my head at the same time that the phone call should never have happened, that Ms Kanoute was truly harmed by it, and yet it could have been a reasonable choice by the janitor to make the call. After this discussion, it doesn’t matter to me what was in his head because her hurt is the crux of the matter. I also accept that I don’t belong on “a jury of her peers” to assess whether Ms Kanoute overreacted, and at the same time I can acknowledge that innocent people were harmed in the aftermath, and that should never have happened. None of these are either/ors. They co-exist in my brain just fine.

I don’t know whether “race relations” (not sure what that term means -is addressing racism a white v Black thing, different factions having to learn to get along? I don’t find it helpful to use that framework; ymmv) have been set back 10 years at Smith. I don’t think any of us will have sufficient perspective to know that for another decade. Change happens in awkward lurches not smooth arcs. This fact pattern is overflowing with opportunities for a dialogue that really needs to happen. If Smith uses it that way, then it could be that it is a big awkward lurch forward, not backwards.

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I am reasonably confident that a significant number of staff members (and yes, some students) will now be highly reluctant to interact in any way with certain poc. Or they will do so only very warily, walking on eggshells. That is what I meant by setting race relations back. Avoiding and fearing each other is not a framework for productive relations in the future.
Dialog is not going to happen when people fear doxxing or employment repercussions, and frankly was never the goal of the Smith president anyway.

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If your use of the terms “reluctant” and “interact” mean the Smith community will be reluctant to take a quick look at a POC and interact by calling the cops that is a good thing.

The staff member in fact called the police because they were “reluctant to interact in any way with a POC”. This dynamic predates the incident and was at its root cause.

Upthread you justified the employee not engaging or even taking a closer look at the student before calling the police.

“There are enough homeless, mentally unstable, stoned, and other worrisome people in public that I would never do so, regardless of whether you think I should. My physical safety is paramount, and I am not willing to risk it; I will call security if something seems off.”

Keep in mind the only attribute the employee noticed was that he/she was black and “seemed off”. It was that type of default stereotyping and fear that caused this to take place.

I actually suspect this event will likely serve to have the Smith Community be more communicative and predisposed to deescalating a situation rather then calling the police as a first reflex.

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I just checked Jodi Shaw’s GoFundMe page. She’s made over $300,000 off of this. I scanned through the comments from funders who cite, among other things, Fox News, Tucker Carlson, “wokeness”, CRT, etc as motivations for contributing to this “hero”. If these are the folks you are referring to, claiming that race relations at Smith have been set back 10 years is far too optimistic…

It seems Ms. Shaw is also quite offended that she was not permitted to do a rap. How Librarian Jodi Shaw Became an Anti-Cancel Culture Hero – Rolling Stone

Like I said in an earlier post, I really didn’t focus on the issue. I may have heard about it 3 years ago, but that’s about it. However, now that I look into this, making Ms. Shaw into a martyr seems laughable in the extreme. The same folks griping about “cancel culture” are griping about this.

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Mynameiswhatever- this is not directed at you but more of a rambling. Please no offense intended!

I am reluctant to embrace any such generalizations as I view it as counterproductive.

If we are trying improve our society it will require dialogue, openness, familiarity and a willingness to forgive. It can’t be achieved if we put people in “buckets” or define them by their worst moments or as opportunists (but I acknowledge yes they exist).

Bigots, race baiters, racists and those that seek to cancel people are far outnumbered I hope and believe by people who earnestly feel compassion and empathy for one another. To define people in extreme terms is to disproportionately empower the fringe them at the expense of those who seek progress.

To be honest that is what has impressed me with this thread. People have been passionate but respectful, which in same cases has informed my views while in some cases not so much😀

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I agree. It is absolutely no different than those who define people by calling them “woke”, “cancel culture”, “libruls”, “Communists”, CRTists, etc.

My specific point about Ms. Shaw is that she is raking in the cash. I fail to see the heroism in that or even engaging in the “good trouble” to effectuate positive change that the late great Rep. John Lewis talked to us about. I am frankly unsure as to what cause she represents beyond herself. The comments on her GoFundMe page, including her own, speak for themselves.

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The NYT did an article about this issue within the last year. The comments, from NY Times subscribers ( not the Fox set) were nearly unanimously negative towards Smith. So no, I am not interested in what the extremists claim, but alerting you that over 2k NYT subscribers apparently share my view that this harmed relations, and that is something you should think about. I would appreciate it if you would stop putting words in my mouth

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Or maybe Smith assesses how their protocol failed, and figures out a better guideline for reporting.

Eta: one part of this scenario that I can’t reconcile is the assumption that the janitor wouldn’t have called the campus police on any other person. I don’t know the Smith culture, but it wouldn’t surprise me that he has a role that is lowest on the power hierarchy, and he was told expressly or he implicitly understood that it wasn’t his place to interact with students, faculty, guests, etc. He knew people weren’t supposed to be in that space, and maybe thought he would get in trouble if someone- anyone - was found there on his shift. And he would likewise get in trouble for actively handling it himself. He is stuck. Ergo the protocol.

Point is we just don’t know, don’t need to know as to what happened to Ms Kanoute. But we sorta do need to know if we want to prevent this problem in the future. A reporting protocol that was less ambiguous and puts less discretion on someone with no authority would help a lot.

Eta2: refining my work-in-progress thoughts one more time. It isn’t that we have to know what is in the janitor’s head, it is that we have to make what is in the the reporter’s head always and unambiguously irrelevant. It may not take away the trauma from having a police officer appear for a POC (how/if that is possible is a much harder question), but I think the goal of the protocol should be (1) to assure someone that the call wasn’t targeted (eg made because someone is “eating while Black”). And (2) to assure the reporter that they won’t get in trouble for invoking it.

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Comments in the NY Times are NOT from subscribers. They are merely folks registered with the NY Times to input comments. Those can be from anyone (or from anything, like a bot).

That’s the basis for your “reasonably confident” views on Smith race relations? Anonymous/unsubstantiated/unverified comments to an NY Times’ article?

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