Academic Staff Under Fire: Jackie Blair, Mark Patenaude, and Jodi Shaw
Oumou Kanoute's Personal Truth Did Not Account For Working Class Facts
As of 2021, tuition, room, and board at Smith College run over $78,000 a year.1 By any measure, the school serves and creates an American elite. Founded in 1871, the private, liberal arts, women’s college in Northampton, Massachusetts has produced high earners in arts, journalism, politics, and other fields. Among them have been an aviator, Anne Morrow Lindberg, a confessional poet, Sylvia Plath, a feminist and co-founder of Ms Magazine, Gloria Steinem, a novelist, Margaret Mitchell, a silver screen star and wife of a US president, Nancy Reagan, a wife of one US president and mother of another, Barbara Bush, a daughter of a US president, Julie Nixon Eisenhower, and Yolanda King, an activist and oldest child of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., among others.
Kitchen workers like Jackie Blair, janitors like Mark Patenaude, campus police, and library employees like Jodi Shaw, are drawn from nearby predominantly white, working-class neighborhoods. To be fair, Shaw is a graduate of Smith but since graduating had lived a “bohemian lifestyle” as an avant-garde musician. Once Smith hired her, she made $45,000 a year, far more than she had been making but far less than a year’s tuition.2 Following an incident between a black Smith student and two of its staff, Shaw resigned.
Here is what happened.
In the summer of 2018, Oumou Kanoute, a Black student took her lunch from the cafeteria into a deserted dorm lounge that had been closed to students for the summer. The room was reserved for teenage enrollees of a summer camp hosted by Smith and was closed to Smith’s students temporarily for the teenagers’ exclusive use. A janitor happened to see the Mali-born student. The staff had been instructed to notify security if any saw unauthorized people there. The janitor called security, as he had been told to do. Both he and the security officer, like all campus police officers, were unarmed. They approached Kanoute and asked her why she was in the closed lounge.
Kanoute took to Facebook alleging that the encounter was part of a pattern of racist harassment at Smith and one which had caused her to experience a “meltdown.” All she had done “was to be black.” She said, “It’s outrageous that some people question my being at Smith College,[sic] and my existence overall as a woman of color.”3
Without doing anything to investigate the validity of Kanoute’s allegations, Kathleen McCartney, the president of Smith College, accepted them lock, stock, and barrel. She jumped right to apologizing to Kanoute, putting the janitor on paid leave, and implementing a series of “reconciliation and healing” initiatives. The initiatives included “anti-bias” training that was mandatory for all staffers, efforts to make campus police more sensitive, and the creation of dormitories reserved for black and other students of color. There was a presumption of racist guilt among staffers and police which resulted in it seeming reasonable that students of color would need segregated dormitories.
In what was undeniably a reflection of Smith’s classism, faculty members were not required to take the training. Some of the faculty protested the problem was not working-class staffers. Rather, the problem was the students who were becoming increasingly accusatory over what had firmed up as a harsh liberal orthodoxy not subject to questioning, that the administration was becoming increasingly subservient to such students over race and gender orthodoxies, and that faculty were becoming increasingly reluctant to challenge students and administrators on these matters. As economics professor, James Miller, said, “My perception is that if you’re on the wrong side of identity politics, you’re not just mistaken, you’re evil.”4
The New York Times, The Washington Post, and CNN picked up on the story of the black college student harassed for “eating while black.” The American Civil Liberties Union took on Kanoute as a client. Smith College hired Anthony Cruthird and Kate Upatham of the Sanghavi Law Office to conduct an investigation. They were to determine whether any employees violated the College’s Affirmative Action Policy in connection with the Kanoute incident so they could make necessary changes. The assumption underlying the investigation, of course, was that Smith staffers and police were racist and that changes needed to be made. Three months later, the law firm issued a 35-page report. It had found no violations of any policy. You can read the report here.5
This all happened in the summer and fall of 2018. To underscore the punitive, cult-like atmosphere at Smith at the time, it may help to know that a year later there was a similar occurrence with some of the same race, class, anti-intellectual, and bullying elements. A young instructor, who was not on the tenure track and was white, was going to teach a proposed class on Native American religion and spirituality in the religious studies department. Tenure is serious business. Without it, a teacher in a university has no real job security. He or she is tantamount to being staff rather than faculty. With tenure, one becomes a permanent member of the faculty. It becomes very difficult to outright fire him or her.6
Quite a few students registered for the class, but they were extra-institutionally blocked by a small coterie of Native American students and allies. The small group put up bright red posters around campus that reviled both the as-yet un-inaugurated class and its white, not-on-the-tenure track instructor. Never mind that the untenured professor had modeled the course on that of his well-known religious studies mentor who was, in addition, a member of the Choctaw nation.
As you might have guessed by now, the administration did not challenge the protestors. It did not stand up for the instructor. Instead, it punished him by making him submit to “radical listening” with the protestors. The religious studies department dropped the class.
Back to Oumou Kanoute, Jackie Blair, Marc Patenaude, Jodi Shaw, and the “eating while black” incident. Kanoute did what we do now: without assuming any responsibility for the incident, nor talking with the alleged perpetrators of racial injustice, she took to social media. She posted a picture of Jackie Blair with the text, “This is a racist person.” As Charlotte Hayes wrote for the Independent Women’s Forum,
Blair, who is married to an automobile mechanic, found the word ‘RACIST’ taped to her car window and received anonymous calls at home. ‘You should be ashamed of yourself,’ one caller told her, while another opined, ‘You don’t deserve to live.’ Media outlets began calling Ms. Blair, the cafeteria worker, for a response to her alleged racism. An official from the Office of Inclusion and Equity twice contacted her to persuade [her] into a mediation with Kanoute, an offer she refused. Ms. Blair suffers from lupus, which is triggered by stress.7 She was hospitalized with it afterward.
Kanoute also posted Marc Patenaude’s picture on social media, typing of him that he had engaged in “racist cowardly acts. Never mind that Patenaude was not even involved in the incident: it had been another janitor who called campus security. “To be honest,” he said later,
I was accused of being the racist. 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. . . . I don’t know if I believe in white privilege. I believe in money privilege.”
After the George Floyd murder, protests re-ignited. Smith furloughed Jackie Blair and other staffers citing the Coronavirus and empty dorms. Blair applied for a job with a local restaurant. The interviewer asked her, “Aren’t you the one involved in that incident?”8
On February 19, 2021, Shaw resigned. She was offered a settlement but turned it down. She had worked hard on getting a promotion in the library, but the offer to submit was rescinded and she had to attend endless “white fragility” sessions. The last straw, she said, was when she attended a mandatory Residence Life staff retreat. The focus was, of course, racial issues. She wrote in her letter of resignation:
The hired facilitators asked each member of the department to respond to various personal questions about race and racial identity. When it was my turn to respond, I said, ‘I don’t feel comfortable talking about that.” I was the only person in the room to abstain. Later, the facilitators told everyone present that a white person’s discomfort at discussing their race is a symptom of ‘white fragility.” . . . In other words, because I am white, my genuine discomfort was framed as an act of aggression. I was shamed and humiliated in front of all of my colleagues.9
What is interesting to contemplate, in addition to the entire dismal “woke” movement, is that Jodi Shaw had an advantage that Jackie Blair and Marc Patenaude did not. She had an upper-class Smith College education and the social facility to use it to her advantage. That social facility included the ability to move on to podcasts and videos. While there are plenty of working-class intellectuals, class is still an advantage when the chips are down.
Michael Powell, “Inside a Battle Over Race, Class, and Power at Smith College,” The New York Times, February 24, 2021. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/24/us/smith-college-race
Bari Weiss, “Whistleblower at Smith College Resigns Over Racism: Jodi Shaw made less in a year than the cost of tuition, She was offered a settlement, but turned it down. Here’s why,” The Free Press, February 19, 2021.
Powell, “Inside a Battle Over Race, Class, and Power.”
Powell, “Inside a Battle Over Race, Class, and Power.”
Sanghavi Law Office, “Investigative Report of July 31, 2018 Incident,” October 28, 2018. https://www.smith.edu/sites/default/files/media/Documents/President/investigative-report.pdf
Powell, “Inside a Battle Over Race, Class, and Power.”
Charlotte Hayes, “She is a Proud Smith Alum, But She Had To Blow the Whistle,” Independent Women’s Forum, March 22, 2012.
Powell, “Inside a Battle Over Race, Class, and Power.”
Jodi Shaw, “Read the Smith College Whistleblower’s Powerful Resignation Letter,” The College Fix, February 21, 2021.