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.”
But the narrative of racist harassment of a minority student at an elitist white institution turned out to be comprehensively false.
“A law firm hired by Smith College to investigate the episode found no persuasive evidence of bias,” Powell writes. “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.”
In fact, the real victims of the event lay elsewhere. Kanoute publicly accused a janitor named Mark Patenaude and a cafeteria worker named Jackie Blair of “racist cowardly acts.” But neither of them was involved in calling campus security. Kanoute also posted their photographs and email addresses. The stress triggered flare-ups of lupus for Blair and anxiety attacks for Patenaude, who has since left his job. (Kanoute later apologized for misidentifying him.) One person called Blair at home to tell her, “You don’t deserve to live.”
As for the anti-bias training, Powell reports that 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.” One courageous school administrator, Jodi Shaw, resigned from Smith in February on the grounds that it had become a “racially hostile environment.”
Some of us who have undergone increasingly fashionable “unconscious bias” training sessions understand what Shaw means: In their sugary tone and invidious assumptions, they can feel like a Cultural Revolution struggle session led by a preschool teacher. (...)
Why does the embrace of social justice pedagogies seem to have gone hand in hand with deteriorating race relations on campus?
One answer is that if many students are enjoying a diet of courses on critical race theory, and employees are trained on the fine points of microaggressions, they might take to heart what they are taught and notice what they have been trained to see.
Another answer is that if those who report being offended gain sympathy, attention and even celebrity, more accusations may be reported.
The deeper answer, I suspect, is that the Woke left has the liberal left’s number. It’s called guilt. (...)
In place of former notions of fairness toward individuals regardless of race, the Woke left has new ideas of “restorative justice” for racial groups. In place of traditional commitments to free speech, it has new proscriptions on hate speech. In place of the liberal left’s past devotion to facts, it demands new respect for feelings.
Meanwhile, many Democrats are sick of holding themselves to a set of standards that Republicans feel no need to try to meet. Twitter is full of people demanding that the party not “Franken” Cuomo, and pointing out that Republicans are taking no steps to investigate alleged sexual harassers in their own ranks, including the freshman congressman Madison Cawthorn. At a certain point, making sacrifices to demonstrate virtue, in the face of an opposition that has none, makes a lot of Democrats feel like suckers.
It's even filtered down into this kind of disordered thinking as typified in a recent Letter to the Editor in my small town:
In light of the recent events surrounding social justice, I wanted to give our city leaders an opportunity to start bridging the social inequity gap. The issue I want to highlight is accessibility, specifically, governmental complexity in construction/permitting that deters social cooperation.
The laws and statutes that form our national, state and local government has evolved into complexity that is largely inaccessible to our community’s diversity. I am disabled and have a low IQ, I struggle with interpreting and advocating access in regards to property rights.
I am asking that the [redacted] Council forgive all the residents that did necessary structural renovations/additions during the pandemic. I have to add on to my house because of family needs stemming from the pandemic, and do not have the money or time or intelligence to navigate this horrible complexity.
Yikes.
