Racism forces us to confront the limits of what we know about ourselves and others. The pockets of uncertainty into which it leads can be harrowing, causing those that are white to confront the very real possibility that racism is alive and well within oneself while leaving people of color struggling with the equally real possibility that they are the targets of racism’s toxic venom. While those who are white may be able to keep alive the possibility that a seeming act of racism has an alternative explanation, those in the Black community often have no such luxury. A case at Smith College, recently revisited in a much publicized New York Times article, brings this difference to light.
In the summer of 2018, Oumou Kanoute, a rising sophomore and first-generation student, grabbed lunch in Smith’s Tyler dining hall. She was not supposed to get lunch from that particular dining hall, as it was reserved for teenagers attending a summer program, but the cafeteria staff did not press the issue. She then went to eat in the empty residency’s living room, an area that was officially closed to unauthorized use. She settled in to read and use her phone, staying after the lunch period ended.
While cleaning up from lunch, a janitor noticed Kanoute alone in the off-limits area. A large stuffed animal obscured his view so that he could neither make out her gender nor make an assessment as to whether she was likely a student, although he could see her legs and realized she was Black.
In a recorded call to campus security, he explained:
I was just walking through here in the front foyer of Tyler and we have a person sitting there laying [sic] down in the living room area over here. I didn’t approach her or anything but um and he seems to be out of place … umm … I don’t see anybody in the building at this point and uh I don’t know what he’s doing in there just laying [sic] on the couch.
In his concern that this unidentified person was “out of place,” the janitor had stumbled into a morass of deep and abiding harm for many first-generation students and people of color on elite college campuses.
Many colleges and universities have predominantly white faculty and upper-level administrators, while those in low-paid service positions often come from more diverse and marginalized backgrounds, effectively drawing a color line between those in positions of power and those serving under them (although, in this case, the service workers were white). Students at elite colleges and universities are often also predominantly white, contributing to a climate in which racial identity reads as an indicator of belonging. In contrast, in 2015 at Sweet Briar College, which sits on the grounds of a former slave plantation, nearly two-thirds of the hourly-wage earners were estimated to be descendants of former slaves.
Upon arriving on the scene, a campus security officer quickly realized that Kanoute was a student and apologized. Still, in the course of that brief conversation, Kanoute learned that someone on campus had deemed her “out of place,” warranting a “suspicious person” call to security.
Kanoute’s anguish and indignation over the incident was immense, and she quickly turned to Facebook to express it: “It’s outrageous that some people question my being at Smith, and my existence overall as a woman of color,” she wrote that night.
Several major news outlets, including CNN, the New York Times, and the Washington Post, ran the story of a Black student seemingly accosted solely for being Black on a predominantly white campus. Kanoute filed a discrimination suit against the college with the support of the ACLU, arguing she was targeted because of her race.
An investigative report found no evidence of racial bias and other factors were certainly involved. Nonetheless, the reality of implicit bias makes it hard to decisively rule out the possibility that race played a hand in motivating the custodial worker’s call. As a graduate student, I often slept in my campus office, too overwhelmed with work to take the time to travel home. Those were always restless nights, as I feared janitorial staff would be alarmed by my presence and report me to security. There were at least two occasions when janitors were indeed surprised to find me “out of place,” but I was never reported. I can’t help but wonder if things might have happened differently if I was Black.
If we are honest with ourselves and each other, I believe that most white people in America will admit to being affected by racist stereotypes that associate people of color with violence. After all, being “white” is as much an identity sculpted through these stereotypes as is being Black. If you are white, as I am, ask yourself: Does your heart race faster if a Black man is walking quickly behind you at night than it does if that man is white? Does an internal alarm go off if you see someone of color you don’t recognize struggling to get into a residential home in your neighborhood while you experience little or no discomfort encountering a white stranger wrestling with a lock?
Some might say that reactions like these make one racist. Delving deeper, renowned critical race theorist, George Yancy, argues that being a racist makes one white. If Yancy is right, the situation is truly grave: as white, one can never exhaustively escape entrapment in an oppressive dynamic whereby one’s identity (down to the very physical sensations one feels) is tied to the chaining of others to racist lies. Rather than publicly pillory a janitor, security guard, or cafeteria worker for potentially having exhibited implicit bias, white people would do better to try to recognize and contest the racism alive in themselves.
All too often, people of color are treated as suspicious for no reason other than race. Consider the recent experience of Amanda Gorman, the sensational young poet who recited at President Biden’s inauguration and during the half-time show at the Super Bowl. On March 5th, Gorman shared on Twitter:
A security guard tailed me on my walk home tonight. He demanded if I lived there because “you look suspicious.” I showed my keys & buzzed myself into my building. He left, no apology. This is the reality of black girls: One day you’re called an icon, the next day, a threat.
Drawing on the insights of the Black existentialist tradition, Yancy adds his voice to a thread of Black narratives that contest the French existentialist credo that “existence precedes essence.” In contrast, he asserts that being Black in America today means that “essence precedes existence.” Franz Fanon expresses this point poetically in Black Skin, White Masks: “I came into this world anxious to uncover the meaning of things, my soul desirous to be at the origin of the world, and here I am an object among other objects.” Where French existentialism celebrates the seeming capacity for every human being to determine who they are and how they are received by others through our own actions, the Black existentialist tradition reminds us that this is a freedom the dominant population rejects for Black people in contemporary America.
Some studies have found that white people are more likely to resist arrest than Black citizens. Yet this fact doesn’t map onto whites such that white offenders are generally approached with more caution or restrained with more force; instead, the opposite is true. For those who are white, the French existentialist mantra captures an abiding truth: one does indeed have the freedom to define oneself. And yet, in a reversal of this truth, being Black pre-determines how one is received in American society. The frequency with which Black people are depicted in major media outlets as the culprits in shootings, robberies, and drug deals, for instance, feeds into a white-dominant culture in which being Black is assumed to make one a threat.
Living in a world where one’s identity is determined prior to one’s actions is made all the more difficult by not knowingwith exhaustive certainty when racism is in play and when it is not. As structural, racism lives in larger patterns, making it difficult to determine its presence with absolute certainty in many isolated instances. Being Black thus means grappling with the haunting sense that one might be reduced to a damaging stereotype at any moment and struggling with the lingering uncertainty of not always knowing when one has indeed been so reduced.
In Kanoute’s case, the deep harm she experienced led to harm to others as she took to Facebook to post photos, names, and email addresses of those she claimed responsible for discrimination against her: the worker who mildly discouraged her from eating in the cafeteria that day, under whose photo she wrote “This is the racist person,” and a janitor (who had not in fact placed the call). The New York Times article details the harm such actions caused these workers, amplified by failures on behalf of the College.
A renewed media frenzy has emerged around Kanoute’s case, with many treating her outcry as exemplary of the shortcomings of ‘the “woke” anti-racist movement. In this way, further harm is being done to a young woman who had every reason to respond to this incident with immense distress, even if that distress did not justify her slandering others.
Indeed, maintaining uncertainty when confronting the prospect of racism can be a luxury. Although when people make judgements like Kanoute’s, they may sometimes get things wrong, these are judgements that people in marginalized positions often simply cannot afford not to make. As our long-standing climate of police violence against people of color attests, it can quickly prove fatal to give the benefit of the doubt to armed officers or even to one’s neighbors.
Unlike others in the philosophical community that have recently commented on this story, I don’t believe Kanoute deserves censure for her quick assessments that day, although she might have thought twice about turning to Facebook to condemn these workers. Instead, what she deserves is a world in which she, too, has the luxury of giving others the benefit of the doubt. Let’s not perpetuate the cycle of harm any further by vilifying either Kanoute or the workers involved in this painful incident. Instead, let’s work to create a world in which we better understand the harms we cause each other and the role that racism plays in each and every one of our lives, in the hopes that we can better confront the violence in our midst and begin to mend our frayed relationships.
Katharine Wolfe
Katharine Wolfe is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at St. Lawrence University, a small liberal arts college perched just north of the Adirondack mountains. Her work considers contemporary topics in environmental ethics, bioethics, and more from a feminist and relational approach and often blends analytic and continental approaches.
The author of this piece would do well to become familiar with some well known cognitive heuristics, such as the availability heuristic. The claim regarding long-standing police violence toward people of color negates serious empirical data that render such claims misleading. Roland Fryer, a black economist at Harvard, has published perhaps the most methodologically sophisticated study to date regarding police-citizen encounters. His conclusions do not fit the current narrative that citizens of color are more likely to be the victims in fatal police-citizen encounters. However, the fact that it is only such encounters that are depicted in newsfeed videos is troubling; it is also a textbook example of the availability heuristic. Also, the encounter at Smith could just as easily be seen through the lens of class. Here we had an elite student, likely to demand a six-figure salary upon graduating from Smith, “accosted” by a working class staff member whose annual salary doesn’t likely approach the student’s annual tuition. Any nuance here?