The rot of racial identity politics and the spoiled college students who demand that the world bend to their fictional worldview has been playing out at Smith College. The university officials and activist lawyers who indulge these students’ fantasies are responsible for creating an atmosphere where skin color rules over reality, even as lives are wrecked in the process.
The incident itself was normal enough. In 2018, Oumou Kanoute, a black student, was eating in a lounge that had been closed for the summer after getting food from a cafeteria that was reserved for children taking part in a summer camp program. A cafeteria employee mentioned that restriction to her but served her anyway, and a janitor contacted campus security to check if Kanoute was part of the program, which was what he was supposed to do.
But Kanoute, tapping into the viral nature of social media and the deference given to unproven accusations of racism, decided to lash out. She claimed she was targeted merely because she was a “woman of color” and publicly accused the cafeteria worker and janitor of being racists. Worse, she identified the wrong janitor, by name. The Black Student Association backed her claim. The real janitor involved was suspended (albeit with pay) for three months. The one she falsely named left his job soon afterward and suffers from anxiety. The cafeteria worker, furloughed during the pandemic, was branded as a racist by numerous strangers and prospective employers. She suffers from lupus, which is exacerbated by stress, and she had to be hospitalized last summer.
All of this because Kanoute lives in a fictional world where she can do no wrong because of her race. She is an adult, and so should know better, but even she isn’t the worst villain. The worst offenders are the university administration and the American Civil Liberties Union, who prop up this victim complex as being legitimate.
College President Kathleen McCartney, who oversaw the college during previous racial-politics mobs, said a discrimination investigation validated Kanoute’s claims, even though its conclusion quite specifically was the opposite: There was no evidence of discrimination by anyone involved. But McCartney bent the knee to social justice, saying, “It is impossible to rule out the potential role of implicit racial bias.”
Massachusetts ACLU Racial Justice Director Rahsaan Hall, serving as Kanoute’s lawyer, announced that the ACLU would bend the knee as well. “It’s troubling that people are more offended by being called racist than by the actual racism in our society,” Hall said, asserting that the harassment the cafeteria worker received was not comparable to the consequences of racism.
Of course, Kanoute was not a victim of racism. As the 35-page investigation report showed, there was no racism in this incident. Kanoute was the antagonist, a privileged student smearing working-class employees who make far less in a year than Smith College students pay in tuition. You would think the ACLU, even if it is only the rotting husk of a civil liberties group these days, would understand that false accusations can ruin lives.
Kanoute’s “personal truth,” as the New York Times calls it, is a falsehood. It is the consequence of social justice, the progressive obsession with race and identity over facts and actual privilege. More importantly, it is the consequence of cowards such as McCartney, who refuse to tell students that their perception of the world is not reality, and ideologues such as Hall and the ACLU, who have surrendered truth and justice for social media mobs and false accusations.
