Feelings Over Facts
Donald McNeil and the Smith College saga offer disturbing evidence that facts are of secondary importance when feelings are hurt.
Earlier this week, Donald McNeil Jr, the science reporter for the New York Times, who was pushed out by the paper last month for alleged racial sensitivity, finally had his say.
In a four-part opus on Medium, McNeil lays out what happened during his ill-fated chaperone trip to Peru, as well as the specifics of his departure from the Times. While McNeil's narrative is at times self-serving, bitter, and a tad tone-deaf, it adds new and disturbing details to the story. As is so often the case in these so-called "cancel culture" blowups, facts have taken a backseat to feelings. These days that seems to be enough.
McNeil's recounting of events tracks with news reporting from last month when this story first broke. He was punished for repeating the "n" word after being asked a question about it during a student trip to Peru. According to McNeil:
A student asked me if I thought her high school's administration was right to suspend a classmate of hers for using the word in a video she'd made in eighth grade. I said, "Did she actually call someone a "(offending word"? Or was she singing a rap song or quoting a book title or something?" When the student explained that it was the student, who was white and Jewish, sitting with a black friend and the two were jokingly insulting each other by calling each other offensive names for a black person and a Jew, I said, "She was suspended for that? Two years later? No, I don't think suspension was warranted. Somebody should have talked to her, but any school administrator should know that 12-year-olds say dumb things. It's part of growing up."
As I wrote last month, no one had accused McNeil of using the "n" word in a derogatory or hurtful manner. He repeated the word after someone else had said it. For those who argue that the "n" word is so noxious that it should never be spoken, that's enough. For those, like myself, who argue that intent still matters, the issue is more complicated.
The other allegations - that he denied white privilege existed and said blackface was not offensive - appears, from McNeil's telling, to have been miscommunicated or misinterpreted. The latter is understandable since the complaints against McNeil came from teenagers, some as young as twelve.
But I'm less focused on what McNeil did or didn't say, but rather how the New York Times handled the situation. When this incident first occurred, the Times dealt with the matter internally. When the Daily Beast wrote a piece about it more than a year later, a spokesperson for the Times said that after its own investigation, "We found he had used bad judgment by repeating a racist slur in the context of a conversation about racist language."
But then 150 Times staffers wrote an open letter claiming to be "outraged and in pain" about McNeil's actions and said that even if the Times had concluded the use of the "n" word was not done "maliciously or with hateful intent," the "intent is irrelevant."
McNeil was soon forced to resign. Here's how he recounts his conversation with the paper's editor Dean Baquet and Deputy Managing Editor, Carolyn Ryan.
Dean started off by saying, "Donald, you had a great year — you really owned the story of the pandemic…."
As soon as I realized he was talking in the past tense, I became tense and started taking notes.
"Donald, I know you," he went on. "I know you're not a racist. We're going ahead with your Pulitzer. We're writing to the board telling them we looked into this two years ago."
"But Donald, you've lost the newsroom. People are hurt. People are saying they won't work with you because you didn't apologize."
"I did write an apology," I said. "I sent it to you Friday night. I sent another paragraph on Saturday morning. Didn't you get it?"
Dean didn't answer.
"I saw it," Carolyn said.
"But Donald," Dean said, "you've lost the newsroom. A lot of your colleagues are hurt. A lot of them won't work with you. Thank you for writing the apology. But we'd like you to consider adding to it that you're leaving."
"WHAT?" I said loudly. "ARE YOU KIDDING? You want me to leave after 40-plus years? Over this? You know this is bullshit. You know you looked into it and I didn't do the things they said I did, I wasn't some crazy racist, I was just answering the kids' questions."
"Donald, you've lost the newsroom. People won't work with you."
"What are you talking about?" I said. "Since when do we get to choose who we work with?"
"Donald, you've had a great year, you're still up for a Pulitzer."
"And I'm supposed to what — call in to the ceremony from my retirement home?"
Carolyn stepped in: "Donald, there are other complaints that you made people uncomfortable. X, Y and Z."
I remember looking at the snow in my garden.
"May I know exactly what X, Y and Z are? And who said I did X, Y and Z? I'm happy to answer anything — but I have to know what I'm being accused of."
Neither of them responded. To me, it felt like an attempt to intimidate me.
What is striking about this exchange is that Baquet clarifies that he doesn't believe McNeil is a racist. He also seems to be suggesting that he doesn't believe McNeil's use of the "n" word was done with malicious intent - a point he made when announcing McNeil's departure.
Rather, the issue is that McNeil's colleagues in the newsroom were hurt, he had lost them, and his job was thus no longer tenable. That's all it took. Merely the accusation of racial insensitivity was enough to end a 46-year career in journalism. In effect, McNeil is guilty without ever being given a chance to prove his innocence. And guilt these days seems to mean one strike, and you're out.
In the abstract, the McNeil story is perhaps just a simple anecdote of wokeness run amok. But it's all very reminiscent of another "cancel culture" story that got written up in the Times last week. This one took place at Smith College in Northhampton, Massachusetts.
In the midsummer of 2018, Oumou Kanoute, a Black student at Smith College, recounted a distressing American tale: She was eating lunch in a dorm lounge when a janitor and a campus police officer walked over and asked her what she was doing there.
"The officer, who could have been carrying a "lethal weapon," left her near "meltdown," Ms. Kanoute wrote on Facebook, saying that this encounter continued a yearlong pattern of harassment at Smith.
"All I did was be Black," Ms. Kanoute wrote. "It's outrageous that some people question my being at Smith College, and my existence overall as a woman of color."
The college's president, Kathleen McCartney, offered profuse apologies and put the janitor on paid leave. "This painful incident reminds us of the ongoing legacy of racism and bias," the president wrote, "in which people of color are targeted while simply going about the business of their ordinary lives."
There was one major problem with the story. An investigation by a law firm hired by Smith College found no actual evidence of racial harassment. Kanoute had eaten in a dorm that was typically deserted. This raised the attention of a janitor, who had been trained to call security in such situations. He never mentioned to a campus dispatcher that Kanoute was black and the unarmed campus security officer who approached her didn't even know her skin color. If there is evidence of racial animus, it's difficult to discern. At the very least, there appears to be no outward evidence of it.
But the damage had been done - and primarily by Kanoute. She went online and publicly accused Jackie Blair, a cafeteria worker, of being a "racist person." She also publicly labeled a janitor, Mark Patenaude, a racist, even though he had left campus before the incident occurred. Neither of them had called security or had been involved. Nonetheless, Kanoute posted their photographs and email addresses online. Both were inundated with angry phone calls and emails. After Blair lost her job during the pandemic, she found it impossible to get a new one because the stain of what had happened at Smith followed her.
Yet, the Smith administration has never publicly apologized to the two workers or made any amends for what happened to them. Blair was urged to enter mediation with Kanoute, because as Smith's president Kathleen McCartney wrote, "A core tenet of restorative justice is to provide people with the opportunity for willing apology, forgiveness, and reconciliation."
Yet Blair declined for a simple reason, "Why would I do this?" she told the Times. "This student called me a racist and I did nothing."
Blair was operating from an understandably faulty premise: that the facts of the case mattered. Clearly, they didn't. Kanoute felt aggrieved and believed herself to be the victim of racial harassment. Everything else appears to be secondary, even Kanaoute's egregious doxing of two people who played no role in the incident.
Of course, implicit racial bias could have played a role here. Perhaps the janitor who called security would not have done so if Kanoute had been white - even though she was clearly in a place that she wasn't supposed to be. We can't know for sure, just as we can't know whether McNeil harbored a powerful feeling of racial antagonism that expressed itself over dinner on a school trip in Peru. None of us are immune from racial stereotyping.
But facts still matter, and punishing people for imagined crimes and hurt feelings doesn't pass the fairness test. In a case like McNeil's, a balancing act must occur between the facts of what he said (which was clearly a mistake), his co-workers' feelings at the Times, and the need for proportionality in meting out punishment. Clearly, in this case, one of these three considerations outweighs the other two. In the Smith case, the facts could not be clearer - and yet the Smith administration seemingly could care less. It was more important, it seems, to appease the feelings of a student hurt than reconcile the far greater damage done to two working-class employees whose lives are forever changed by an incident in which they played no role.
Perhaps, as Rahsaan Hall, who is the racial justice director for the ACLU in Massachusetts and Kanoute's lawyer, argues, there are simply larger issues at stake here. "It's troubling that people are more offended by being called racist than by the actual racism in our society," he told the Times. "Allegations of being racist, even getting direct mailers in their mailbox, is not on par with the consequences of actual racism."
But how does any of this further the cause of racial justice? Is the Times a more diverse and open-minded institution because Donald McNeil, a man with no documented history of racism but who once used the "n" word at a private dinner, is no longer reporting on science for the paper? Has Smith College, a liberal arts college where tuition, room and board amount to $78,000 a year, struck a blow against racism? It's hard to see how the answer to either question is "yes." Or perhaps more specifically, two elite, liberal institutions unsure of how to reckon with calls for racial justice have instead taken the far easier route of performative anti-racism - a path defined by attention to feelings rather than facts.
Feelings Over Facts
Hi Michael –
I have been a fan of yours for many years and I have enjoyed reading your emails from The Globe.
I normally do not openly react to some of the serious shit you have written about (think: Trump) but this article "Feelings Over Facts" reminded me of a story I read years ago. It was about school children bringing "weapons" to school. School leaders and parents who were paranoid created a zero–tolerance policy. This policy was used to suspend or expel students who crossed the line and tested the authority by bringing knives and/or guns with them to school. Some students were seriously punished by principals and some went to face a judge. Then there was a story about an early elementary student who was probably 8 or 9 who was "caught" with a fingernail trimmer. This made the news! This young student was sent home, confused about what he/she did wrong. I wonder how the student's life went from that point on.
This story is certainly not parallel to a story as volatile as one about racism. However, it does suggest how difficult it is to steer the rudder of society when people react or overreact. These stories you wrote about can be debated about right or wrong/guilty or not guilty. But, we should take a close look at ourselves and focus on the important things in our lives stop getting wrapped up in often meaningless details.
This kind of thing gives political fuel to the right.
Good intentions gone wrong for sure here.
And these have serious impacts.
Ask a school teacher, so much good work has focused on schools without funding and support.