Like many readers of The New York Times, I was riveted by Michael Powell’s account last week of a 2018 incident at Smith College that illustrated the tension between issues of race and class. It’s a striking – and increasingly familiar – tale of the battle the Woke left is now waging on well-meaning liberals who don’t seem to understand the illiberal nature of what they are facing.
For those who missed it, the story begins in the summer of 2018, when Oumou Kanoute, a student at Smith, recounted that she had just been confronted by a campus police officer while she was eating lunch in a dorm lounge.
“All I did was be Black,” she wrote on Facebook. “It’s outrageous that some people question my being at Smith College, and my existence overall as a woman.” She added that the officer might have been carrying “a lethal weapon.”
The post drew national media attention. A janitor fingered as having started the episode was put on paid leave. The American Civil Liberties Union got involved. The college rolled out anti-bias training for its staff and set aside separate dormitories for students of color. Kathleen McCartney, Smith’s president, offered Kanoute an effusive public apology, saying, “This painful incident reminds us of the ongoing legacy of racism and bias in which people of color are targeted while simply going about the business of their ordinary lives.”
But the narrative of racist harassment of a minority student at an elitist white institution turned out to be comprehensively false.