Recently, an article from the New York Times, “Inside a Battle Over Race, Class and Power at Smith College” by Michael Powell, has sparked great attention and controversy among Smith students and employees. It puts the incident of a Black student, Oumou Kanoute, in the national spotlight again. On July 31st, 2018, Oumou worked on campus as a teaching assistant — while she was having her lunch in a closed house common room, she was racially profiled and harassed by the police. Two and a half years later, this alarming incident has not yet been forgotten, neither by Smith students and employees — as is manifested by the giant #BlackLivesMatter flags fluttering in the wind across campus — nor reporters from nationally and internationally renowned news outlets. Yet, in contrast to the dominant narratives on Smith campus that are empathetic with Oumou, Powell’s article, on the contrary, claims that Smith’s practices on racial issues were radical and have gone so far as to affect the physical and mental well-being of its white employees. Reminiscent of Republicans’ rhetoric that “political correctness oversteps its boundaries,” this article lays bare the deeply embedded conservatism of the Times beneath the façade of its “liberal” advocacy.
At first glance, however, I did not find this article completely nonsensical: it calls attention to the power dynamic between “elite” college students and “working-class” staff that has long been overlooked in the contemporary discourses around higher education. Of course, nobody can deny that a certain power imbalance exists between these two parties, which can be interpreted in different ways. Through an orthodox Marxist lens, one can argue that the students, who are the consumers of elite college education, occupy the higher ground within the power hierarchy in the student-staff dynamic within Smith College. After all, not anyone, especially working-class people, can afford the 78,000-dollar school tuition and expenditures. But does that mean everyone who went to Smith comes from bourgeois families? Certainly not. In fact, according to the US News report, 59% of the student body at Smith receive need-based financial aid in the 2020-2021 academic year, an indispensable part of which comes from the work-study program. This data reveals that more than half of Smith students are workers themselves, whether they work on or off campus. Hence, it is self-evident that equalizing all Smith students with higher socio-economic class is not only factually untenable, but also erasing the lived experience of the majority of students, especially those of color, who rely on their work on/off campus to afford Smith’s dauntingly high tuition.
On the other hand, one can argue that college students are the disadvantaged group here. As we know, students are susceptible to institutional power on various dimensions, including but not limited to codified school rules and disciplines, absolute authority of faculty who hold grading power, and school staff’s implicit prejudice with regard to the students’ race, gender, sexuality or nationality. In spite of what the investigation result says, what happened in the midsummer of 2018 is emblematic of institutional racism that many students of color, including myself, find themselves subject to from time to time.
Despite setting the tone of the article as if he was speaking for Smith workers whose voices are reduced to silence, Powell, whether inadvertently or intentionally, has drawn a division and, to use his own word, “collision,” between the students of color and the white staff on campus. Admittedly, this division might be present at Smith, yet what I am doing here is not trying to compare or contrast the extents to which students of color and working staff are respectively disadvantaged in order to figure out who wins the “oppression olympics.” Not only because doing so would risk eradicating the intersection between students of color and the working class, but more importantly, doing so would risk falling into the ideological trap of capitalism which pits minority groups against one another.
In fact, one may wonder — is the division worth so much spilled ink? Is it really necessary to place an incident that took place two and a half years ago under the spotlight again? Why would someone from a media as authoritative as The Times publish so long an article to call attention to the racial and class dynamic at a small liberal arts college in western Massachusetts? And what has it to do with Smith’s radicalness on racial issues this article keeps ridiculing? Indeed, in service of whose interests is this underlying rhetoric that portrays as irreconcilable such “collision” between janitors and students of color, both of whom are economically disadvantaged? And by what spirals are the students of color who are themselves susceptible to institutional discrimination turned into unforgivable perpetrators of the appalling “cancel culture?”
What astounds and infuriates me the most with Powell’s article is not simply its distortion of facts illustrative of his lack of professionalism, but the cunning way in which he transforms Oumou, a student of color who was still healing from her past traumas, into someone guilty of the most heinous crime — the crime of wrongfully accusing an innocent white woman. Compared to only a few words descriptive of the traumas Oumou went through, this article spills a plethora of ink depicting the discomforts of Ms. Blair, the white staff who was mistakenly accused by Oumou of racism, and other Smith employees who felt overwhelmed by Smith’s “racially hostile” environment. In doing so, the writer has clandestinely diverted attention from the systemic oppression, i.e. the white supremacist capitalism, which is a root of oppression students of color and staff share in common, to a fictitious struggle against each other. In reality, students of color, and school staff have been fighting on the same front and advocating for their rights together for years.
As was exemplified by many notorious political maneuvers in history like the Southern Strategy, it is a classic master’s tool to set minorities against each other in order to solidify his power. Silvia Federici has warned us in Caliban and the Witch, the development of capitalism necessitates perpetuating divisions within the working class. By further installing hierarchies and inciting lateral violence among the workers, capitalism stabilizes the status quo and consolidates its power. Therefore, we need to keep in mind the importance of solidarity rather than division, and only if we are all united, can we envision and actualize a better world.
