Inside a Battle Over Race, Class and
Power at Smith College

A student said she was racially profiled while eating in a college dorm. An investigation
found no evidence of bias. But the incident will not fade away.

Smith College is an 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
neighborhoods. Christopher Capozziello for The New York Times

By Michael Powell
Published Feb. 24, 2021Updated March 3, 2021

NORTHAMPTON, Mass. — In midsummer of 2018, Oumou Kanoute, a Black student at
Smith College, recounted a distressing American tale: She was eating lunch in a dorm
lounge when a janitor and a campus police officer walked over and asked her what she
was doing there.

The officer, who could have been carrying a “lethal weapon,” left her near “meltdown,”
Ms. Kanoute wrote on Facebook, saying that this encounter continued a yearlong
pattern of harassment at Smith.

“All I did was be Black,” Ms. Kanoute wrote. “It’s outrageous that some people question
my being at Smith College, and my existence overall as a woman of color.”

The college’s president, Kathleen McCartney, offered profuse apologies and put the
janitor on paid leave. “This painful incident reminds us of the ongoing legacy of racism
and bias,” the president wrote, “in which people of color are targeted while simply going
about the business of their ordinary lives.”

The New York Times, The Washington Post and CNN picked up the story of a young
female student harassed by white workers. The American Civil Liberties Union, which
took the student’s case, said she was profiled for “eating while Black.”

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.

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.

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.

President McCartney, like all the workers Ms. Kanoute interacted with on that day, is
white.

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. Christopher Capozziello for The New York Times

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 atmosphere at Smith is gaining attention nationally, in part because a recently
resigned employee of the school, Jodi Shaw, has attracted a fervent YouTube following
by decrying what she sees as the college’s insistence that its white employees, through
anti-bias training, accept the theory of structural racism.

“Stop demanding that I admit to white privilege, and work on my so-called implicit bias
as a condition of my continued employment,” Ms. Shaw, who is also a 1993 graduate of
Smith and who worked in the residential life department, said in one of her videos. After
months of clashing with the administration, Ms. Shaw resigned last week and appears
likely to sue the school, calling it a “racially hostile workplace.”

Her claims drew headlines from Fox News to Rolling Stone this week. Alumni, faculty
and students continue to debate the issue. All of this arose from the events of July 31,
2018.

A Summer Day

Ms. Kanoute, New York-raised, a 5-foot-2 runner and science student, was the first in
her family, which had emigrated from Mali, to attend college. She worked that summer
as a teaching assistant and on July 31 awoke late and stopped at the Tyler House
dormitory cafeteria for lunch on her way to the gym. This account of what unfolded next
is drawn from the investigative report and dozens of interviews, including with a lawyer
for Ms. Kanoute, who declined several interview requests.

Student workers were not supposed to use the Tyler cafeteria, which was reserved for a
summer camp program for teenagers. Jackie Blair, a veteran cafeteria employee,
mentioned that to Ms. Kanoute when she saw her getting lunch there and then decided
to drop it. Staff members dance carefully around rule enforcement for fear students will
lodge complaints.

“We used to joke, don’t let a rich student report you, because if you do, you’re gone,”
said Mark Patenaude, a janitor.

Ms. Kanoute took her food and then walked through a set of French doors, crossed a
foyer and reclined in the shadowed lounge of a dormitory closed for the summer, where
she scrolled the web as she ate. A large stuffed bear obscured the view of her from the
cafeteria.

A janitor, who was in his 60s and poor of sight, was emptying garbage cans when he
noticed someone in that closed lounge. All involved with the summer camp were
required to have state background checks and campus police had advised staff it was
wisest to call security rather than confront strangers on their own.

The janitor, who had worked at Smith for 35 years, dialed security.

“We have a person sitting there laying down in the living room,” the janitor told a
dispatcher according to a transcript. “I didn’t approach her or anything but he seems out
of place.”

The janitor had noticed Ms. Kanoute’s Black skin but made no mention of that to the
dispatcher. Ms. Kanoute was in the shadows; he was not sure if he was looking at a man
or woman. She would later accuse the janitor of “misgendering” her.

The atmosphere at Smith is gaining attention nationally, in part because a recently resigned employee has
made public her complaints of a push for white staff members to embrace an ideology of structural
racism. Christopher Capozziello for The New York Times

A well-known older campus security officer drove over to the dorm. He recognized Ms.
Kanoute as a student and they had a brief and polite conversation, which she recorded.
He apologized for bothering her and she spoke to him of her discomfort: “Stuff like this
happens way too often, where people just feel, like, threatened.”

That night 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.”

Her two-paragraph post hit Smith College like an electric charge. President McCartney
weighed in a day later. “I begin by offering the student involved my deepest apology that

this incident occurred,” she wrote. “And to assure her that she belongs in all Smith
places.”

Ms. McCartney did not speak to the accused employees and put the janitor on paid leave
that day.

Stumbles Over Race

Ms. McCartney and her staff talk often of their social justice mission, and faculty say this
has seeped into near every aspect of the college. A committee of students and faculty
members has proposed a minor in social justice studies. That said, the president had
stumbled in ways that left her bruised by the time of the 2018 incident.

In 2014, she moderated an alumnae discussion in New York on free speech. A white
female panelist argued it was a mistake to ban Mark Twain’s “Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn” because he used the N-word; that panelist then uttered the word in
hopes, she said, of draining the word of its ugly power. Students denounced Ms.
McCartney for failing to denounce that panelist. The president requested forgiveness.

Later in 2014 she wrote to the college community, lamenting that grand juries had not
indicted police officers in the deaths of Black men. “All lives matter,” Ms. McCartney
concluded in an inadvertent echo of a conservative rallying cry. Again, Smith students
denounced her and again she apologized.

Ms. McCartney appeared intent on making no such missteps in 2018. In an interview,
she said that Ms. Kanoute deserved an apology and swift action, even before the
investigation was undertaken. “It was appropriate to apologize,” Ms. McCartney said.
“She is living in a context of ‘living while Black’ incidents.”

The school’s workers felt scapegoated.

“It is safe to say race is discussed far more often than class at Smith,” said Prof. Marc
Lendler, who teaches American government at the college. “It’s a feature of elite
academic institutions that faculty and students don’t recognize what it means to be
elite.”

The repercussions spread. Three weeks after the incident at Tyler House, Ms. Blair, the
cafeteria worker, received an email from a reporter at The Boston Globe asking her to
comment on why she called security on Ms. Kanoute for “eating while Black.” That
puzzled her; what did she have to do with this?

The food services director called the next morning. “Jackie,” he said, “you’re on
Facebook.” She found that Ms. Kanoute had posted her photograph, name and email,
along with that of Mr. Patenaude, a 21-year Smith employee and janitor.

“This is the racist person,” Ms. Kanoute wrote of Ms. Blair, adding that Mr. Patenaude
too was guilty. (He in fact worked an early shift that day and had already gone home at
the time of the incident.) Ms. Kanoute also lashed the Smith administration. “They’re
essentially enabling racist, cowardly acts.”

Ms. Blair has lupus, a disease of the immune system, and stress triggers episodes. She
felt faint. “Oh my God, I didn’t do this,” she told a friend. “I exchanged a hello with that
student and now I’m a racist.”

Ms. Blair was born and raised and lives in Northampton with her husband, a mechanic,
and makes about $40,000 a year. Within days of being accused by Ms. Kanoute, she
said, she found notes in her mailbox and taped to her car window. “RACIST” read one.
People called her at home. “You should be ashamed of yourself,” a caller said. “You don’t
deserve to live,” said another.

Smith College put out a short statement noting that Ms. Blair had not placed the phone
call to security but did not absolve her of broader responsibility. Ms. McCartney called
her and briefly apologized. That apology was not made public.

By September, a chill had settled on the campus. Students walked out of autumn
convocation in solidarity with Ms. Kanoute. The Black Student Association wrote to the
president saying they “do not feel heard or understood. We feel betrayed and tokenized.”

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.

The Investigative Report and the Aftermath

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.
Image

A view of Paradise Pond from the President’s House at Smith College. Christopher Capozziello for The
New York Times

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?”

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.”

Ms. Blair was reassigned to a different dormitory, as Ms. Kanoute lived in the one where
she had labored for many years. Her first week in her new job, she said, a female student
whispered to another: There goes the racist.

Anti-bias training began in earnest in the fall. Ms. Blair and other cafeteria and grounds
workers found themselves being asked by consultants hired by Smith about their
childhood and family assumptions about race, which many viewed as psychologically
intrusive. Ms. Blair recalled growing silent and wanting to crawl inside herself.

The faculty are not required to undergo such training. Professor Lendler said in an
interview that such training for working-class employees risks becoming a kind of
psychological bullying. “My response would be, ‘Unless it relates to conditions of
employment, it’s none of your business what I was like growing up or what I should be
thinking of,’” he said.

A few professors have advised Ms. McCartney to stand up more forcefully for line
workers lest she lose their loyalty.

Asked in the interview about employees who found the training intrusive, the president
responded: “Good training is never about making people too uncomfortable or to feel
ashamed or anything. I think our staff is content and are embracing it.”

Coda

In addition to the training sessions, the college has set up “White Accountability” groups
where faculty and staff are encouraged to meet on Zoom and explore their biases,
although faculty attendance has fallen off considerably.
The janitor who called campus security quietly returned to work after three months of
paid leave and declined to be interviewed. The other janitor, Mr. Patenaude, who was
not working at the time of the incident, left his job at Smith not long after Ms. Kanoute
posted his photograph on social media, accusing him of “racist cowardly acts.”

“I was accused of being the racist,” Mr. Patenaude said. “To be honest, that just knocked
me out. I’m a 58-year-old male, we’re supposed to be tough. But I suffered anxiety
because of things in my past and this brought it to a whole ’nother level.”

He recalled going through one training session after another in race and
intersectionality at Smith. He said it left workers cynical. “I don’t know if I believe in
white privilege,” he said. “I believe in money privilege.”

As for Ms. Blair, the cafeteria worker, stress exacerbated her lupus and she checked into
the hospital last year. Then George Floyd, a Black man, died at the hands of the
Minneapolis police last spring, and protests fired up across the nation and in
Northampton, and angry notes and accusations of racism were again left in her mailbox
and by visitors on Smith College’s official Facebook page.

This past autumn the school 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.’”

She talked to a reporter recently from a neighbor’s backyard, as a couple of hens
wandered the patio.

“What do I do?” she asked, shaking her head. “When does this racist label go away?”

A correction was made on
March 3, 2021

An earlier version of this article referred imprecisely to a summer camp program at
Smith College. It served high school students, not young children. The article also
misstated students’ ability to obtain a social justice minor at the college. A minor has
been proposed but cannot currently be obtained.