Past hoax · Filed Oct 16, 2026
Eating While Black Hoax
A Black customer was attacked for the act of eating, and the clip was the proof.
The claim
A Black customer was attacked for the act of eating, and the clip was the proof.
What it was
The short clip was the case. What happened before the camera was not the caption.
Timeline
Jul 31, 2018
Oumou Kanoute, eating in a closed Smith College dining area, is questioned. She says she was racially profiled.
Aug 2018
CNN reports she cannot sleep. Staff are named, including people who did not make the call.
Oct 2018
An independent investigation finds no racial bias. She was in a building that was shut.
Feb 2021
A fuller account of what the staff lived with reaches a national paper. The original headline has already taught the story.
What aired
In the summer of 2018 a Smith College student, Oumou Kanoute, said she had been racially profiled while eating lunch. CNN’s headline was that the incident left her so shaken she could not sleep. A janitor and other staff were named, with photographs, as the people who had called the police on a Black student for the act of eating.
The record
She was in a dining area that was closed for the summer. Staff had been told to check anyone who was there. A janitor mentioned her. A cafeteria worker called security. Security called campus police. An independent investigation found no evidence the call was about race. The staff were cleared in the fall of 2018. The national story of a racist interruption of a Black student’s lunch kept its shape anyway.
Left out
Left out was the closed room. “Eating while Black” requires that the eating was the offense. The offense, as the college had defined it for everyone, was being in a shut building. Also left out were the names that were posted online of people who had not made the call. They lived with the posting longer than the investigation lived on television.
Why it stuck
It stuck because the headline is a complete morality play and the investigation is an HR memo. A student who cannot sleep is a victim. A rule about a closed dorm is not a segment. The memo arrived, and the headline had already taught the country what Smith College was.