Welcome to the Colette Podcast. My name is Claire Lehman and I am editor and chief of Colette.

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Welcome to the Colette Podcast.

I'm Jonathan Kay.

On Thursday, April 11th, shortly after 11 p.m.

a Black Columbia University student named Alexander McNabb walked through the gates of Bernard College,

the undergraduate all-women school at Columbia, after ignoring a security guard's request to show his student

ID.

In search of a midnight snack, McNabb got all the way to the library canteen before a

public safety officer confronted him and asked for his ID a second time.

A request McNabb once again refused.

What I just read was the opening paragraph

of Coleman Hughes widely read Colette article

Cowardess at Columbia. In that column, Hughes, who is both a Columbia undergraduate student and a regular

Quilett columnist, argues that the security guards who confronted McNabb at Columbia were simply doing their job.

Yet the entire episode has been presented as an example of racism on campus.

...