Jodi Shaw tells Tucker Carlson it's ‘impossible to have a healthy community if individuals cannot connect’
Smith College was the center of national attention when a student said she was targeted for "eating while black." Jodi Shaw was one of the few people at Smith to stand up and set the record straight. Her life has never been the same since.
On Monday's "Tucker Carlson Today," former Smith College employee Jodi Shaw discussed the dangerous rise of wokeness and how the left's intent to divide people makes it "impossible to have a healthy community" in many places.
In 2018, student Oumou Kanoute, who is Black, was approached by a janitor and a police officer at the Northampton, Mass., women's liberal-arts college, while eating in a closed dorm lounge, and was asked what she was doing there.
At the time, the local ACLU characterized the encounter as Kanoute being questioned for the crime of "eating while Black." Kanoute accused the pair of campus employees of racially profiling her and posted pictures on social media accusing them of being racist. The janitor she named wasn't working that day.
Smith College, however, went on to force the pair to undergo anti-bias training and apologize to Kanoute. Further investigation found them to be wrongly accused and that Kanoute was indeed dining in a closed area.
Shaw, who is a "lifelong liberal" and was a staffer making less than $50,000 per year at the institution, according to the New York Post, resigned her job because being branded a racist based only on her skin color didn't sit well with her.
"It taps into humanity’s worst instincts to break down into warring factions, and I fear this is rapidly leading us to a very twisted place," part of her letter to college president Kathleen McCartney read.
On Fox Nation's "Tucker Carlson Today," Shaw told Carlson that there are still faculty at Smith who know the discriminatory environment is wrong.
"[It's] like I know that you know, I know that you know this is wrong. And you have tenure and you’re close to retirement. What is going on here? Why are you not saying anything?" Shaw said. "You’ll have a mob descend on you [if you stand up]. I don’t know the rules of tenure but someone once told me there are 5 to 8 percent of the population who are true believers. And there’s also 5 to 8 percent population that will stand up and say no when somethings wrong. The rest I honestly don’t know."
She told Carlson that being so isolated from one another in a sensitive environment makes it "impossible to have a healthy community if individuals cannot connect."
"I’m not going to make a joke or make small talk with this person because I might get in trouble, like serious trouble," she considered. "There might be material consequences. So now we have situation which we are not connecting with each other anymore. Now we are kind of getting isolated from each other and that’s really dangerous."
"It’s impossible to have healthy community if individuals cannot connect with each other," she added.
Bob Woodson, a civil rights leader from Philadelphia, told Fox News earlier this year that the Smith incident was indeed a case of racism.
Woodson said at the time that Martin Luther King Jr. once described racism as malevolent not because "it is visited upon Blacks by Whites -- it's bad because it's evil."
"We must unite to confront the evil. What we're witnessing at Smith is that the school stereotyped -- they took the actions of a few Whites and assumed this was generalized to the whole population and then punished them," he told Fox News back in March.
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