Hi there welcome back I'm Jodi Shaw, I work at Smith College in Northampton Massachusetts,
I work in the department of Res Life and Student Affairs and I am here to tell you part one of why
I am making these videos. A couple things happened to me at Smith College that were explicit, blatant
acts of racial discrimination and I'm going to talk about both of them. This is the first one.
When I started working at Smith I was a temporary employee. I was an Outreach and Engagement
Librarian, and I really wanted to get a job at Smith permanently, full-time, that was my dream
and my hope and so I was really happy to have this job as a temporary librarian and a chance to prove
myself. So I was working really really hard during that first year to prove myself so that I could
possibly get a full-time position. Well, lo and behold about eight or nine months after I started
working there, a full-time position opened, and so I applied for it. Now on the academic in the
academic world and this. . . being a librarian is . . you are on the academic side of the college,
these things take a long time. They fly people in, they have a search committee,
so on and so forth. So I applied for the job. Around the same time
I was tasked with a huge project, and that project was to create a library orientation
for 600 incoming first-year students. So I was on it. I was like: I'm going to do this,
I'm going to do a great job, and this is going to be my chance to prove myself. So I
can . . . it'll be a huge boost to my resume if I can pull this off and do a great job.
So, one of the first things I did was I talked to the person who does scheduling
for the overall orientation all around campus to get a venue. This person told me you can have
a an entire concert hall for your orientation, but in exchange you have to do something crazy.
I don't want you getting up there and doing a boring slideshow about the card catalog.
So I said deal. And I left her office thinking "okay what the heck am I going to do?" I have a
music background and so I started thinking maybe I can do something musical and I thought how can
I transmit a lot of what is normally fairly dry information about the library in a very
most efficient manner that's musical? A rap! That would be perfect. I'll do a rap. So I assembled
a team, I had musicians, a sound person, other people involved in making this very large event
happen. And for any of you who ave ever organized an event of this magnitude, it is huge. I worked
way after hours, many hours, over my normal hours and again there were a lot of people involved. And
remember, I'm at this point a candidate for a full-time position in the library that I'm
very much hoping to get. So about a month before the event was to take place
the incidents of July 31st 2018 happened. And I am going to talk about those incidents but not
in this video because it's way too much but I want to put that in there because
after July 31st 2018 the campus kind of went into overdrive, like this hyper-racially
tense environment, people like, really walking on eggshells and getting all these declarations from
the college administration about how, you know, we need to address this incident and we have
to have healing around race, and just a whole lot of like . . . very hyper-conscious of race
in general. A little less than a week, like maybe five days before this huge culminating event,
in front of 600 people, and remember it had been promoted by this time,
all these people were involved my supervisor took me aside and he said "you can't do the rap."
So I said "why?" and he said "because you're white and it would be viewed as cultural appropriation."
So I asked him "if I was a person of color would I be able to do it? Would that be okay?"
and he said, "Yes." He didn't even hesitate. Note how I didn't specify what color
just the response was that anybody else except for a person of color
basically could do it but you can't do it because you're white and this
was memorialized in an email and I'm going to show you the email....um . . .right now
Okay, so here is the email. It was sent to me on august 30th 2018 which was about a month after the
July 31st incident. Basically what my supervisor asked me to do was record the rap performance
in an office, and then he took the video recording to go and view it
with a colleague to determine whether or not it constituted a rap performance. Because if it was
"spoken word" or "patter song" then it would be okay for me to do it but if it's "rap" then it was
not okay. So then he informed me "just to give you an update on our thinking we both watched it and
we agreed the best descriptor for the performance is rap and that is how it would be perceived by
students." So he's making an assumption about what 600 incoming students are going to think,
how they're going to categorize this performance. "We both think incorporating
rap int our orientation presentation to an audience of first-years is not advisable.
The use of rap as a medium by a white staff member and student [so the student I was working with on
stage was also white] could easily be perceived as insensitive or cultural appropriation by incoming
Smith students." So notice he wasn't telling me it was insensitive of me to be doing a rap, or that
it was cultural appropriation. He was concerned it might be *perceived* as such, so therefore we're.
. . we're already operating out of this fear of perception. "And, could create a perception
[there's another perception] with students that the library is not racially sensitive."
So it's okay to tell a staff member you can't do this because of your skin color
in order to prevent the perception that the library might be racially insensitive. ". . . and
we don't want to reinforce the fact that our organization is not very racially diverse." So
in other words, we don't want to remind people of the reality that there are a lot of white
people working in the library because that's bad. "I know this was not all in your intent
in creating this performance no my intent was just to do the orientation unfortunately this summer's
incident he's referring to July 31 2018, there has already resulted in students of color feeling
unwelcome on Smith's campus." Again, how many students of color we have on campus? We have a lot
50 percent, as far as I know, of the students of on campus are not white, so apparently my
supervisor knows how they all feel at this moment in response to the incident " . . . and especially
right now we don't want the libraries to be seen as contributing in any way to that sentiment." So
here you see how he's justifying this because of the incidents of July 31st 2018, and it's all
based on perceptions of what might . . . something might be perceived, and what might be believed,
and it's okay to be racially insensitive to you as long as we don't risk being seen as possibly
racially insensitive by these 600 first-year incoming students. So there you go. That's
that's the email. While I was at Smith this whole first year there was a lot of messaging
about white privilege, and how white people have power. It's intrinsic to just having white skin
regardless of your history or your . . . what you've been through, or who you are, and so
in my mind I felt very strongly that this feels like racial discrimination to me.
But I also had these little voices in my head that told me um, it's it's really
not racial discrimination, because you're white and your white privilege cancels that out,
and that's not possible. And so I actually - I had all these feelings of anger, and
just, frustration and and even humiliation because I had to go back and tell these people "hey
we're not doing this event and here's why," and I couldn't, didn't feel like I could
express my anger or my irritation because I felt like there was some shame involved
in having those feelings. Like there were these little voices in my head telling me
"you shouldn't be feeling angry or ashamed, you're white. You have so much privilege and
how dare you be upset about this." So there was all that going on inside. And on the practical
side, I did think maybe I should file a complaint. I ended up *not* filing a complaint because
I honestly believed that if I filed a complaint, whether with Smith, or the state and anybody
found out -and obviously people would find out because they would do an investigation- I would
never get a job. Nobody would ever hire me at Smith College or anywhere. I feared that because
I am not supposed to make a claim of racial discrimination if I'm white. And clearly,
the fact that my supervisor had no hesitation in telling me "you can't do this because you're
white," and doing it within a week of the event, I mean really, come on. No qualms about saying that,
and no qualms about putting in the email. What it says to me is that it's okay to discriminate
against a white person. It's perfectly acceptable. So I didn't file a complaint. I did go to the Dean
of Libraries and I was like, I need to do this rap, like this is really important and
she said something to me that still haunts me. And this is a paraphrase. She said
"how you respond to this will show us your
resourcefulness and your resiliency in light of your candidacy for the full-time position."
When I heard that I think my heart stopped because what I heard was, if you don't
go along with the fact that we have just racially discriminated against you very quite explicitly
if you will not be seriously considered for this full-time position that we know that you want.
So I think that's enough intimidation for a person to not file a complaint and not make a stink or
say anything about what had happened. What it did do to me in the end
was it made me not want to be in that atmosphere at all,
and I guess I kind of equated that atmosphere with the academic side of Smith.
I also had a suspicion that they don't want to hire a white person. And I have reason to believe
that. I have heard people saying I don't want to hire a white person, things like that, at Smith.
So later when I did go file a complaint after the second incident happened (that's part two, the
next video), when the the officer who processes complaints of racial discrimination at Smith,
I met with her and I told her what had happened (I mean this was very explicit
it was in an email) and she looked at me and she said, "Do you believe in white privilege?"
And another thing she said during that meeting was the Civil Rights act of 1964 was created to
protect traditionally marginalized groups. Which I interpreted to mean not me. I am not protected by
the civil rights act of 1964. This is the person who processes racial
discrimination complaints, and has a law degree and ostensibly is knowledgeable in this area.
She also told me that if I do file a complaint that she would have to hire an outside
investigator because she doesn't have expertise in this area, which was baffling to me. So I asked
her, I said "aren't you the person who processes complaints of racial discrimination?" and she said
"Yeah, but you're white so it's different." And I said "Well, how is it. . . " I asked her "How
is it different?" She said "Well it's reverse discrimination so it's a whole different thing."
So all of these things are major red flags. It doesn't exactly inspire confidence in me that
the complaint is going to be taken seriously. I mean, clearly it's just more of the same stuff.
It's just more of the same. So what I ended up doing, I withdrew my application for the
position. I did not want to be in this environment anymore. I did not want to - at this point I was
really skeptical of - of anything having to do with uh, having to talk about race or anything,
or white privilege. So I withdrew. And I had applied for a job on another part of campus.
Luckily it was kind of a backup. I'm not saying I knew for sure I was going to get it, but I did end
up getting it and there was good and bad about it. Good was that I was going to get away from
this environment, and this new job (which is also kind of the bad thing) was not programmatic or
instruction . . . I wasn't going to be teaching students like I was in the library. I would . . .
it would be doing very task oriented things, like helping students get keys, helping them get their
locks, changed their ID cards, things like that. And which clearly was not there was not going to
be any overlap, with any kind of, having to talk about my race or racial stuff or so I thought.
It did involve taking a very large pay cut, it did involve uh taking a job that I am not
trained for, that I'm paying student loans for, to be a librarian and I'm, I'm not. So
that's what I did, and something else happened that is if not equally as egregious,
in some ways was worse what happened to me in residence life. And that was, that second thing
that happened, along with all of this backdrop at Smith, of this just hyper-racialized environment
and especially after July 31st 2018, just made it even worse. So I'm going
to talk about that in part two because that's really what pushed me into finding a complaint
at Smith. Posting the video came a little later. So that's it that's part one to my story,
now you know what happened to me in the library at Smith College as a white person. Blatant, outright
racial discrimination, without any hesitation whatsoever. Okay. Jodi Shaw, let's keep talking