By Katie Goss ’23, March 7, 2021
Jodi Shaw, the former student support coordinator in the Department of Residence Life at Smith College, publicly resigned from the college at the end of February due to what she called a “racially hostile environment.”
She outlined that this “hostile environment” had been brought to campus through anti-bias and racial sensitivity training. Shaw, a Smith alum who graduated in 1993, originally wrote in her resignation letter that she was “over the moon” to be back at Smith as a staff member. She highlighted that a shift into this “hostile environment” started in July 2018 after Oumou Kanoute, a Black student attending Smith at the time, had campus police called on her while she was eating lunch in a dorm lounge.
Shaw wrote, “The climate — and my place at the college — changed dramatically when, in July 2018, the culture war arrived on our campus when a student accused a white staff member of calling campus security on her because of racial bias.”
Kanoute took to social media to spread her story of what had happened, saying, “All I did was be Black. It’s outrageous that some people question my being at Smith College and my existence overall as a woman of color.”
Although a private investigator by a hired law firm found no “persuasive evidence of bias” in the incident, according to a New York Times article, the College instituted anti-bias training for faculty and staff, including campus police.
Kathleen McCartney, the president of Smith College, wrote a public apology to Kanoute. “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,” McCartney said in the letter.
Shaw argued in her resignation letter that when Smith instituted anti-bias training, the college only supported the idea that the incident with Kanoute was racially motivated and that faculty and staff at the college are racist. She went on to explain how she felt this personally affected her in her job and life on campus and in the community.
After preparing for a library orientation program in August 2018 which she “poured a tremendous amount of time and effort” into, she was told that she would not be able to perform it since it was a rap. She said she was told by her supervisor, “‘Because you are white’ … that could be viewed as ‘cultural appropriation.’”
Cultural appropriation is the practice of borrowing traits or customs from cultures other than one’s own. This can be contentious if the culture being appropriated is oppressed or marginalized, particularly when the borrowing party has historically held power over them. “My supervisor made clear he did not object to a rap in general, nor to the idea of using music to convey orientation information to students. The problem was my skin color,” Shaw claimed.
She had been up for a new full-time position in the library and felt that her candidacy for the position was “dead in the water” since she had to come up with a new program after spending months creating her original one. As a result, she took her former position as the student support coordinator in the Department of Residence Life.
Shaw said that, as an employee of the college, she was expected to “participate in racially prejudicial behavior” by managing student conflict “through the lens of race,” as she described it. She said she was asked to support and help teach a curriculum to the students that would teach them to project assumptions and stereotypes onto not only themselves but others as well. “I believe such a curriculum is dehumanizing, prevents authentic connection, and undermines the moral agency of young people who are just beginning to find their way in the world,” Shaw wrote.
In January 2020, Shaw attended a mandatory retreat focused on discussing racial issues. After stating that she was not comfortable answering a question in regard to her racial identity, she said the facilitator said “a white person’s discomfort at discussing their race is a symptom of ‘white fragility.’” She felt that because she was white, her discomfort was being “framed as an act of aggression.”
After filing a complaint about this incident, she said she thought it was not taken seriously due to her whiteness. Shaw even wrote that she was told the civil rights laws were not “created to help people like me.” She then felt that there was retaliation from her employer when certain parts of her job were “taken away without explanation.”
After this, Shaw decided that she could no longer be a part of the Smith community. Throughout her employment and after her resignation, Shaw created YouTube videos discussing her concerns and complaints about this implemented system at Smith. She now has a total of 13 videos.
“It terrifies me that others don’t seem to see that racial segregation and demonization are wrong and dangerous no matter what its victims look like. Being told that any disagreement or feelings of discomfort somehow upholds ‘white supremacy’ is not just morally wrong. It is psychologically abusive,” Shaw wrote. “Equally troubling are the many others who understand and know full well how damaging this is, but do not speak out due to fear of professional retaliation, social censure, and loss of their livelihood and reputation.”
Shaw also mentioned that she was offered a settlement if she left the college and did not speak up on the issues she had, but that she turned it down.
“My need to tell the truth — and to be the kind of woman Smith taught me to be — makes it impossible for me to accept financial security at the expense of remaining silent about something I know is wrong,” she explained.
In a public message to the Smith community the following day, McCartney denounced this accusation, stating that Shaw had actually demanded money in exchange for “dropping a threatened legal claim and agreeing to standard confidentiality provisions.”
“At Smith College, our commitment to, and strategies for, advancing equity and inclusion are grounded in evidence,” McCartney wrote in her response letter. “The aim of our equity and inclusion training is never to shame or ostracize. Rather, the goal is to facilitate authentic conversations that help to overcome the barriers between us, and the college welcomes constructive criticism of our workshops and trainings.”
Shaw wrote a response to McCartney’s letter, claiming that Smith did offer her severance in exchange for leaving and her silence. Although she said she strongly considered taking the severance, she decided not to in order to show “the importance of telling the truth and … urging others to do the same.”
Her response letter to the College ended with, “I look forward to seeing Smith in court.”
Since her resignation, news outlets such as Fox News and The New York Times have written about the issue. An article titled, “Inside a battle over race, class and power at Smith College” was published by The New York Times on Feb. 24, explaining in detail the 2018 incident with Kanoute and making Smith out to have a hostile environment in regard to race. A Fox News article titled, “‘Lifelong liberal’ resigns from Smith College over allegations that school was ‘racially hostile’” described Shaw’s resignation as well as the college’s response to it.
This is the most recent story in regard to race at Smith and Mount Holyoke colleges.
In 2018, Sonya Stephens, president of Mount Holyoke, said the N-word at the Posse Plus retreat when she invoked the title of a book. Although she publicly apologized to the College and even wrote an apology in the Mount Holyoke News titled “Doing the work and the power of personal reflection,” students were offended by this incident, especially since she had not yet been officially inaugurated as the College’s next president.
“While my reasons for referring to this work were in support of racial justice — and were, paradoxically, a reflection on white privilege and historic (colonial) economic, social and cultural oppression — the use of this word in any context is hurtful and inflammatory. My saying it made it all the more so, given my racial and national identities and my educational privilege — not to mention my current role as acting president of the College,” Stephens said in her apology.
Stephens was later inaugurated as the new president of the College, a position she still occupies.
In 2014, McCartney faced backlash after writing in an email to members of the Smith community titled, “We are united in our insistence that all lives matter,” in response to juries in Missouri and New York that did not indict the two police officers responsible for the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner. She later apologized and said she did not know the phrase “all lives matter” was being used to take attention away from the violence against Black people. McCartney even added a few student messages she had received that she felt were helpful in explaining the phrase “Black lives matter.”
After the summer of 2020, during which the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Jacob Blake and more were followed by massive protests across the country, Smith and Mount Holyoke each put forth plans to address racism on their campuses, both historical and ongoing.