For Black Smith students, it’s everywhere. In a sly glance a non-Black student gives you as you innocently laugh with your friends, a white person unapologetically talking over you, a professor not having much faith in your smarts or a white roommate who only speaks to you when they need a counseling session.
Since it’s so widespread, it can be subtle: a non-stop panging ache of discomfort that runs through each and every one of our social interactions and the recesses of our psyches. Racism at Smith doesn’t only look like obvious, one-time incidents like calling campus police on a Black student –– Black Smith students experience racism on the daily. On Nov. 1, the founding members of the Black Menaces, a bold group of Black activists at Brigham Young University, had a conversation with some students and I about what this everyday racism looks like at both BYU and Smith, creating vital cross-university dialogue.
“Racial microaggressions are so common at BYU and Predominantly White Institutions (PWIs) and people assume ‘that’s not racism since I’m not calling them the N word,’” Kennethia Dorsey, one founding member of the Black Menaces, says. “There are other forms of racism that people don’t realize are at all of these universities all over the country.”
Ultimately, we arrived at a pressing question: Would a Black Menaces chapter at Smith help the college combat this pervasive racism?
The group of five BYU students — Kennethia Dorsey, Nathanael Byrd, Kylee Shepherd, Sebastian Stewart-Johnson and Rachel Weaver — created the Black Menaces on TikTok earlier this year. In their initial TikToks, they asked BYU students questions about racism and homophobia in relation to their Mormon university’s religious norms. After going viral on the app, the group widened their purpose: they’ve started chapters at several universities and have kickstarted various initiatives such as a podcast and a scholarship. Their mission? “To empower marginalized communities through social media.”
The Black Menaces had their first ever formal university visit at Smith, where they were welcomed by a cheering crowd in Weinstein Auditorium. Both at their larger event and our smaller discussion, one theme kept on coming up: the difference between covert and overt racism. What’s the difference and how do they show up differently at Smith and BYU?
BYU is unique and, in many ways, starkly different from Smith. The school, a private university in Provo, Utah, is sponsored by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS). Students at BYU are expected to follow an honor code that falls in line with the teachings of the church, such as their mandated abstinence from same-sex romantic relations.
In the mid-1800s, the LDS church instituted a ban that prohibited Black members of the church from attaining priesthood and entering the temple –– a ban that wasn’t lifted until 1978. This reflects a wider ignorance of race that the Black Menaces say is prevalent in the LDS community. So at BYU, where Black students make up less than 1% of the student body, people tend to not be well-educated on race and Black people in general.
“I think we all noticed that generally BYU is a space that is not welcoming to us existing as being Black,” Weaver says. “There was pain until we couldn’t take it anymore and we had a decision to make: do we leave the way everyone wants us to or do we make the decision for ourselves, finish our education and make it the best we can?”
The Black Menaces have done just that, causing necessary upheaval at BYU by starting controversial conversations. In their first TikTok, they reacted to a video in which Brad Wilcox, a BYU professor and LDS leader, tells a congregation that church members often ask him why Black men were prohibited from priesthood for so long. He responds, saying that we should instead “be asking why the whites and other races have to wait until 1829.” In their reaction video, the Black Menaces walk off-screen, clearly disgusted by Wilcox’s comment.
The video immediately went viral, launching the Black Menaces into TikTok fame. Nowadays they do just about anything that forces students to confront their racist, and other, biases. They most commonly ask students unexpected questions, such as: “Should queer students be allowed to date openly on campus?” “Do you support critical race theory?” Or even more simply, they’ll show students a photo of Rosa Parks and ask if they know who she is (spoiler alert: many don’t).
“BYU is such an extreme example, which catches peoples attention,” Weaver notes. “But this is the reality for every single Black person in America.”
It certainly is –– yes, even at Smith. While BYU students’ racist ideas are quite obvious in their answers and conservative religious doctrine, racism can be even more covert at Smith, a liberal historically women’s college whose entire political personality is being hellbent on queer and women’s rights.
As a historically women’s college, there is a history of white, queer, liberal feminism that has become the face of this campus’ politics. In political conversations, little attention is paid to the specificity of Black and Black queer experiences; white queerness overshadows that all, with many often equating ‘the Black struggle’ to ‘the queer struggle’.
“I think a lot of people think since they have a struggle, they think they know the Black struggle,” Dorsey remarks. “That’s why a lot of ‘woke’ people who may be part of the LGBTQ+ community — and that’s a struggle that I don’t know — still have to acknowledge that they don’t have the same struggles as a Black person.”
Since Smith students are predominantly left-leaning and tend to be very vocal about their queer white feminist politics, it’s easy to see Smith as a radical, liberal paradise void of oppression. But that is simply not how Black students experience this school.
Namwiinga Maimbo ʼ24J, a Black Smith student who grew up in the South, has much to say in response to students who often tell her that she must be “grateful” to be out of the racist South and in Northampton, where she must feel more liberated.
“At least there (in the South), they’re overt about racism,” Maimbo stated. “At Smith, one thing that’s a big enabler for people to just go into hiding and be very anonymous about their racism is the Confessional.”
The Smith Confessional, an anonymous online forum, is a frequent avenue for students’ overtly racist thoughts. Social expectations of liberal politics at Smith funnel most overtly racist ideas and acts into such anonymous and private spaces. As Maimbo notes, this means that public forms of racism are more covert and harder to detect here –– well, if you’re not a racialized minority.
As I mentioned, Black Smith students experience racism everyday in often subtle ways. But common understandings of racism at Smith tend to solely focus on one-time occurrences, individual ‘racists’ and sensationalized ‘racial incidents.’
Smith has recently been in the national spotlight for a couple of such incidents. In 2018, national and local news rushed to report on an incident wherein a janitor, assuming that a Black Smith student was in fact not a student, called the campus police on Oumou Kanoute, who was simply eating in a dorm lounge. News coverage on this suspected case of racial profiling was abundant, leading many readers to associate racism at Smith with this singular event.
In January 2021, Jodi Shaw resigned from her position in Residence Life at Smith after creating a series of videos that called out the college for creating a “divisive, racially hostile work environment” for her and other white members of the community. Once again, national media latched onto the controversy and blew up the incident on a wide scale. The news particularly tried to use this incident to further a conservative narrative condemning cancel culture on college campuses –– in doing so, they dismissed the realities of racism at Smith.
While it was necessary that these cases gained visibility, both incidents are some of the first, and only, things Smith students bring up when discussing racism on campus. This is a problem –– and I’ll tell you why.
When one-time incidents and lone individuals marked as ‘racists’ become the face of a college’s racist reality, people are able to detach themselves from that reality. When people talk about Jodi Shaw as an outlandish racist, for example, they’re able to create a sort of racist identity that they themselves cannot possibly be complicit in. Only racists, or Karens, can be racist and I’m surely not a racist or a Karen…
We need to go beyond understanding racism at Smith as only existing in singular people and random, rare encounters. Racism is an act that all non-Black people can, and probably do, execute everyday, and we need to accept that.
When we shift our conversations about racism towards everyone’s everyday complicity in it, we can more easily get to the root of the problem. We can’t topple racism by focusing only on sensationalized incidents. We will only truly battle racism on this campus when we change the very way all of us think about Black people and other racial minorities. Maybe then this campus will begin to be a safe space for Black students.
We can’t make this kind of change without making people uncomfortable. The Black Menaces actually see discomfort as necessary in their politics.
“When you think of menaces, you think of people who have been in prison, or killed, or broke the law…like MLK, Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Angela Davis… These are all people who were hated,” Stewart-Johnson says. “Menaces cause trouble and are hated but are so necessary to society because they push it in an uncomfortable way.”
The Black Menaces have recently expanded their organization, now hosting chapters at various universities across the nation. What if Smith had a Black Menaces chapter? Would it stir up some good trouble?
Maimbo answers that “It would force a conversation.” If Black Menaces approached students to ask questions about race, Maimbo explains, some students may be struck speechless while others may have whole “think pieces” on the topic.
“It’s important to know your audience,” Byrd mentions. Topics that may be important to ask about at BYU, such as LGBTQ+ rights, obviously wouldn’t be as pressing at Smith. Questions about race, however, are essential. Still, I’d hope a Smith Black Menaces chapter would bring race in conversation with other things, like sexuality, to highlight the even more unique experiences of groups like Black queer folks.
As the founding members of the Black Menaces broaden their outreach and lengthen their list of initiatives, Smith students should consider starting a chapter. What kinds of change would a Black Menaces chapter bring to Smith? How would it disrupt the way students typically talk about race and other subjects? How might it bring Black students’ experiences to the forefront of our collective attention in an effective way? If I know anything, I know that the burden of battling racism should not fall on Black students –– non-Black people need to put in the work to confront their own biases.
Conversations about race also need to be centered around Black students. Black experiences can not be equated to other people of color’s experiences. Just as they are across the nation, Black folks at Smith are the most abused, belittled and denigrated racial minority on campus.
Anti-Blackness doesn’t only affect Black students. It shapes non-Black students of color’s experiences with racism — this means that when we pay special attention to Black experiences, we destabilize the very core of racism, relieving all non-white people of centuries-long struggle.
