(CNN)In the summer of 2018, Oumou Kanoute read a book and ate her lunch in a common room area of a Smith College residence hall that required keycard access. Since she was in a program teaching high school students over the summer, she was able to access it.
That simple moment became a national story when campus police arrived a short while later, and the officer told her that an employee reported a Black person “demonstrating suspicious behavior.”
She posted the incident on Facebook, then the school, in the face of significant backlash during a year in which “living while Black” incidents were frequently reported, announced an investigation. The probe found no sufficient evidence that Kanoute was discriminated against for her race, according to the report commissioned by the school.
This 2018 incident was brought to light again after the New York Times reported last week on the fallout on campus. Part of the fallout, the Times piece reported, was the resignation of an employee resigned on February 19, citing the “racially hostile environment” for White people at the school.
Some Smith College employees complained that the school is a pushover to student complaints regarding race, and apologizes too quickly without looking at all of the facts, according to the New York Times story. Some of the staff mentioned in the article also said that the anti-bias training required by the school made them feel uncomfortable, as if they were accused of being racist.
The incident at Smith College is just one of many that have happened at college campuses in the last several years and highlights the struggles many colleges have had in combating implicit racial bias on campus. Yale University in Connecticut, Barnard College in New York City and Ball State University in Indiana have all dealt with similar incidents since 2018 and have promised school initiatives to address what happened.
While schools are trying to work on effectively addressing these biases, some experts say that it’s not easy to prove negative intent when accusations of racial bias are made.
“In implicit stereotyping, there is a belief of how we expect those students to behave and what they should or should not be doing,” said Nao Hagiwara, Associate Professor of Health Psychology at Virginia Commonwealth University.
“The issue with the case is that implicit stereotyping is associated with microaggressions. It’s really subtle behavior, and can easily be justified. It’s really hard to look at the intention of the individual.”
Research has also shown that some White people can react negatively to the types of anti-bias training that is currently used by most institutions, Hagiwara said. While these types of training can bring awareness to the issue of bias, she continued, they often do not provide the tools on how to fix behavior, leading to many White people becoming anxious and reacting negatively.
In Kanoute’s case, the Smith College incident highlighted “the need for a systemic equality approach,” said Carol Rose, the executive director of the ACLU of Massachusetts, which represented her.
“The problem with ‘see something/say something’ policies is that dispatchers too often are instructed to always dispatch the police — even when there was no suspicion of a crime or danger,” she said in a statement.
“We urge colleges and universities to adopt policies that require dispatchers who receive calls from staff who ‘see something suspicious’ to collect specific facts, so that the dispatcher can determine the right person to send to the scene — such as a Resident Assistant or student life expert — rather than always dispatching the police.”
CNN has also reached out to Kanoute directly.
I get a lot of my news from CNN, but this kind of intellectually dishonest reporting is disappointing to say the least.
In the third sentence of this article, CNN reports as fact that :”the officer told (the accusing student) that an employee reported a Black person ‘demonstrating suspicious behavior’ “ This appears to be cut and pasted from CNN’s original hatchet job of August 3, 2018:(Headline:”Smith college student who was racially profiled while eating says the incident left her so shaken she can’t sleep”) In any event, the original article made clear that the student attributed the above statement to the responding officer, CNN now presents that statement as fact.
CNN’s lead in that the officer in fact told the student that he was responding to a report of a “Black person” acting suspiciously borders on being intentionally false or misleading. The transcripts of the calls from the janitor to the campus police dispatch reflect that the janitor made no mention of the race of the person he saw reclining on a sofa in the (non- air conditioned) lounge of a dorm which was then empty for the summer. Per the comprehensive investigative report, the responding campus officer further said that he did not receive ANY physical description of the “suspicious male,” including the person’s race, before arriving on the scene. Under the total circumstances (empty dorm, closed cafeteria, kid’s camp nearby), calling campus police was an entirely reasonable judgment call.
In yet another nod to the alleged “implicit racial bias” allegedly in play here, CNN pulls a quote from a Health Psychology professor: “In implicit stereotyping, there is a belief of how we expect those students to behave and what they should or should not be doing,”
To the extent the professor’s comment relates to the “incident,” I’m not sure what the Professor’s point is, apart from obscuring the facts. Again, an unknown person was lying on a couch in an empty campus dorm in the summer time, with a kid’s camp in session nearby. Expectations of student behavior seem completely irrelevant here, unless I’m missing something. But on the subject of behavioral expectations, I would point out to the Professor that the student’s doxxing of the janitor and cafeteria worker caused substantial harm to innocent people (the entire subject matter of which this CNN reporter studiously ignores). “Implicit stereotypes” aside, this is not acceptable behavior.
The ACLU has also acquitted itself miserably here: “The problem with ‘see something/say something’ policies is that dispatchers too often are instructed to always dispatch the police — even when there was no suspicion of a crime or danger,” says Carol Rose of the ACLU.
There was plenty here to justify a call to campus police. The officer conducted himself flawlessly. The issue here wasn’t “see seeing, say something,” it was this student’s inability to respond appropriately to an exceeding brief, polite encounter with campus security in what should have been a non-incident. In any event, this student is not now and never was a victim here.
CNN should do a retraction story like the NYT has done, but I’m betting they won’t.