Knowledge Cultures 3(1), 2015, pp. 24–44
ISSN (printed): 2327-5731 • e-ISSN 2375-6527

PHENOMENOLOGY OF RACIAL OPPRESSION
LAUREN FREEMAN
Lauren.Freeman@Louisville.edu
University of Louisville
ABSTRACT. This paper attempts to further understand the lived experiences of racial oppression by bringing together personal testimonies, resources from phenomenology, and empirical work on stereotype threat. Integrating these three areas provides a psychological, existential, physiological, and embodied understanding of the fundamental harm of racial oppression. My aim is to show that the harm of existing as racially oppressed is not just psychological or physiological. That is, racial oppression is not only harmful with regards to the immediate and lasting effects of the compiled stresses that result from continually being made aware of one’s bodily existence as
“other” in a predominantly and normatively white world. In addition, racially oppressed people also often lose a sense of themselves, become alienated from themselves, and come to understand themselves vis-à-vis the oppressor. Combining contextualized analyses of the psychological, existential, physiological, and embodied dimensions of oppression, I argue that existing as racially oppressed in a white supremacist society also changes the ontological structure of one’s being-in-the-world.
Keywords: phenomenology; oppression; stereotype threat; Martin Heidegger
“Only when we come to be very clear about how race is lived, in its multiple manifestations, only when we can come to appreciate its often hidden epistemic effects and its power over collective imaginations and public space, can we entertain even the remote possibility of its eventual transformation”
(Alcoff, 2001: 267).

This paper attempts to further understand the lived experiences of racial oppression by bringing together personal testimonies, resources from phenomenology, and empirical work on stereotype threat (ST). Integrating these three areas provides a psychological, existential, physiological, and embodied understanding of the fundamental harm of racial oppression. My aim in this paper is to show that the harm of existing as racially oppressed is not just psychological or physiological. That is, racial oppression is not only harmful with regards to the immediate and lasting effects of the compiled stresses
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that result from continually being made aware of one’s bodily existence as
“other” in a predominantly and normatively white world. In addition, and importantly, racially oppressed people also often lose a sense of themselves, become alienated from themselves, and come to understand themselves visà-vis the oppressor or oppressive system. Combining contextualized analyses of the psychological, existential, physiological, and embodied dimensions of oppression, I argue that existing as racially oppressed in a white supremacist society also changes the ontological structure of one’s being-in-the-world.
The paper has three sections. I begin by considering various testimonies and descriptions of individuals who reflect upon what it is like to exist as racially oppressed in a normatively white society. These testimonies were chosen to highlight the extent to which the minutiae of everyday existence – shopping, walking down the street, riding in an elevator, getting locked out of one’s car or house, wearing a hoodie, encountering the police, or, as William
David Hart has called it, “black male being-in-America” (Hart, 2012: 91) – are infused with constant reminders of one’s existence not only as “other” but as “inferior,” “suspicious,” “dangerous,” and “guilty.” These testimonies illustrate the relentless psychological, and indeed existential toll of existing as racially oppressed. I then move from considering the psychological and existential harms of existing as racially oppressed to considering physiological harms by examining some empirical findings from the ST literature. What these findings show is that the physiological effects of being racially oppressed become embodied. That is, they are not just immediate and “skin-deep” but are penetrating and enduring. With the psychological, existential, physiological, and embodied dimensions in hand, I finally go on to argue that existing as racially oppressed actually changes the ontological structure of one’s beingin-the-world.
In what may be considered a controversial move, especially now, 1 I make the case that a valuable resource for understanding the ontological dimension of oppression is Martin Heidegger’s account of attunement (Befindlichkeit).
According to Heidegger, attunement is an ontological structure that constitutes both how we find ourselves (sich befinden) in the world and how we are faring in it. Attunement is one of the most basic lenses through which we experience the world and ourselves and a fundamental way in which the world is disclosed to and affects us. Being attuned cannot be severed or isolated from the context – the world, environment, and our particular situation in it – in which it manifests itself. But with regards to understanding the lived experiences of racial oppression, there are also some important problems with
Heidegger’s account. My claim is that a modified and developed version of the structure of Befindlichkeit is helpful for understanding the ontological nature of racial oppression (and by “ontological” I mean the fundamental way in which one’s existence in the world is structured). Whereas Heidegger’s
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account of Befindlichkeit as an ontological structure is uniform, permanent, and unchanging, I will argue that existing as racially oppressed ontologically alters the structure of one’s being-in-the-word, and as such, one’s world.
Heidegger did not discuss the possibility of ontological structures differing between individuals. For him, they are invariable for every human being and what changes is the ontic mode, content, or manifestation of the structure.
However, what I hope to show is that once we consider what it is like to exist as racially oppressed, what we are faced with is not simply an ontic (or contingent) difference from the way that members of dominant groups exist; rather, we are faced with a difference in ontological structure (that is, the structures that make existence possible).
If we are to fight against racial oppression, as Linda Alcoff reminds us in the epigraph of this paper, it is important to understand the extent to which we are dealing with a multi-faceted, multi-layered issue that has personal, practical, historical, moral, social, and political implications. A first and important step then is to try to understand not only the personal, existential, psychological and embodied harms that oppression causes, but also how these harms penetrate to the ontological core of one’s being-in-the-world. This paper is a step in that direction.
I
In her essay “A Phenomenology of Whiteness,” (2007) Sara Ahmed elaborates upon Husserl’s and Merleau-Ponty’s descriptions of the body as “successful” and as being “able” to extend itself (through objects) in order to act on and in the world. Within this context, the question that immediately arises is whose body is the subject of such claims? Ahmed goes on to consider the ways in which Frantz Fanon helps us to unmask the extent to which this “success” is not (or, not just) a measure of competence, but rather is also a form of bodily privilege. That is to say, it is an important yet often unacknowledged and overlooked privilege to be able to move through the world without losing one’s way, without one’s body being made salient in ways that problematize how one exists in and how and whether one is able to navigate (safely) through the world. In order to set the context for developing a phenomenology of racial oppression – that is, for understanding the multifaceted, first-personal dimensions of what it is like to exist as racially oppressed – in this section I consider a number of ways in which Black people in the United States are not able to navigate through the world safely on account of the fact that the perception of their bodies either foreclose certain possibilities or put them in physical danger. Ahmed speaks of the ways in which whiteness functions
“as a form of public comfort by allowing bodies to extend into spaces that have already taken their shape” and she discusses how for many, such spaces
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are “lived as comfortable as they allow bodies to fit in” (Ahmend, 2007: 158).
That is, for many, it is not an issue that our bodies can move through the world safely and that they do not foreclose important possibilities to us. For many, not thinking about our bodies as possible barriers to a safe existence in the world is a privilege, one that often goes unnoticed. In what follows, however, I am interested in cases where the spaces that Ahmed discusses do not exist and the individuals for whom such spaces are not and have never been a lived reality. In order to better understand what it means to exist in the world as such, I will cite several testimonies and descriptions of racial discrimination followed by some general comments on the nature of such experiences. In their 2006 paper, “Does Race Matter? The Phenomenology of Discrimination Experienced among African Americans,” Michael L. Birzer and
Jackquice Smith-Mahdi undertake a qualitative phenomenological study of
Black men and women. 2 The aim of their study is to consider how Black people experience discrimination in order to understand how victims of such discrimination contextualize meaning to cope with their experiences (Ibid.,
24). In their words, their research in general and specifically the testimonies they collected provide “a small snapshot into the pain and mental anguish that
African Americans continue to experience as a result of being Black” (Ibid.,
33). Specifically, they consider four different sets of experiences: shopping, contact with law-enforcement, employment, and the very general category of
“being Black in Topeka.”3 The idea is that by considering testimonies from individuals in ordinary, everyday situations in which most people find themselves, we can begin to better understand what, as one participant put it,
“living while black” (Ibid., 27) is like.
With regards to “shopping while Black,” most of the testimonies echoed the same theme, namely, participants were assumed to be suspicious, deceptive, guilty, and possibly dangerous. For example, one participant reported the following: “Yes, as soon as I walk into the store everybody like turns around and looks at you, follows you around and asks you, do you want to buy that?” (Ibid.). To this comment, another participant added, “Now when I go to clothing stores, I’ll look up and there’ll be other folks in the store and they’re watching me while the store is being stolen blind two aisles over”
(Ibid.). A third participant said that “you might walk to the gas station, and when you walk in they will position themselves so they can watch you.
They’ll try to look like they’re hanging something on the racks and all the time watching you over the counter” (Ibid.). Discussing what it is like to shop at a popular department store, one participant reported: “This store has a bad reputation for discriminating against Blacks. They even have undercover police follow all the Black customers around. It’s so obvious when they do it” (Ibid., 28). And another participant said that “it would be like they have
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these undercover shoppers, and they will just be watching us. Sometimes I look right back at them. Sometimes they act like they are shopping but they’re just watching us” (Ibid.).
In a fitting commentary on what is going on here, George Yancy describes the psychological, existential consequences of constantly being presumed guilty: “Within such social spaces as these, the sheer cumulative impact of such racist actions can result in a form of self-alienation, where the integrity of one’s Black body is shaken, though not shattered, self-alienation can assume various forms, from self-doubt to self-hatred” (2001: 2). Importantly though, these presumptions of guilt and danger do not just manifest themselves in stores; rather, they are ubiquitous. Yancy explains: “While walking across the street, I have endured the sounds of locking car doors. I have endured white women clutching their purses or walking across the street…During such moments, my body is given back to me in a ludicrous light, where I live the meaning of my body as confiscated” (Ibid., 67). Not only is the result of such experiences self-alienation, but such experiences are part of a larger
“destructive process of superfluous self-surveillance and self-interrogation”
(Ibid., 68). Echoing the idea that existing while Black is to exist in what
W.E.B. Du Bois called a state of double-consciousness, Yancy continues to explain that in such instances, “[a] fundamental phenomenological slippage occurs between one’s own felt experience of the Black body and how others
(whites) understand/construct/experience that ‘same’ Black body” (Ibid., 76).
In other words, the existential toll of existing while Black is ever-present since the (white) space we are talking about here is not one that can be escaped. It is a space that confines, confuses, degrades, and in some important senses, destroys one’s existence.
In an essay entitled “Dead Black Man, Just Walking,” William David Hart discusses what it is like for many Black men to encounter police officers:
“Long before they encounter the police, black people are suspect. Criminalization precedes arrest and detention. Black Americans have long been suspect, illegitimate, the subjects of a ‘spoiled collective identity’ that is rooted in their enslavement” (2012: 95). Many of the testimonies collected by Birzer and Smith-Mahdi (as well as many of the news stories that one hears on any given day in this country) echo this point, namely, that “Blacks are the prototypical ‘usual suspects,’ always already under suspicion” (Ibid., 95). Specifically, one participant in Birzer and Smith-Mahdi’s study recounted what happened when he locked his keys in his car. When he was using a coat hanger to unlock his car in order to retrieve his keys, a police officer quickly arrived, followed by two backup squad cars. “They were like, whose car is this?” After explaining to them that it was his car and that he had locked his keys in it, they not only would not help him, but they ran his tags for possible warrants (Birzer and Smith-Mahdi, 2006: 29).4 We can also remember
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a similar incident not too long ago when Harvard Professor Henry Louis
Gates, Jr. was arrested while trying to unjam the lock on the front door of his
Cambridge, Massachusetts house; or a case with a much more tragic ending, when Amadou Diallo was shot at 41 times and hit with 19 bullets by four plain-clothed officers in the vestibule of his apartment building in the Bronx upon reaching for his wallet (which they assumed to be a gun) to show his identification.5 Hart aptly summarizes what is going on in these and in many other similar cases like them:
Black people are objects of a criminogenic gaze. They are constructed as criminals. Regardless of the race and gender of the perceivers, black people, especially black males, are perceived as criminal…
[they] are perceived as always already guilty of crime (or of being predisposed) in the absence of evidence, even in the presence of contrary evidence. Black criminality is ontological (96).

From these and many other testimonies collected, Birzer and Smith-Mahdi found that the “essential invariant structure of discrimination” for those who live as Black in America6 was “fear, frustration, depression, and anger” (2006:
24, 27). Importantly, many of the participants expressed a constant fear of going out that began at an early age. Many also discussed physical threats that they frequently encountered in their workplaces, in college, and by police.
Also common amongst participants was a deep feeling of being fed up with and tired of constantly and scrupulously being watched in public places, while shopping, while driving, while paying for gas, where in all of these contexts they were presumed to be and treated as guilty and dangerous. Living with such constant harassment takes a toll on one. “To have one’s dark body penetrated by the white gaze and then to have that body returned as distorted is a powerfully violating experience” (Yancy, 2001: 66).
There are numerous examples of how simply existing as Black in America is constructed as a social threat and experienced as lethal for those who are constructed as such, but few are as paradigmatic as the murder of Trayvon
Martin (and the ways in which it was covered in the media). As David Polizzi writes, in this case “the contours of these constructed fears are not only present within the visibility of the physical body but also come to represent a type of geographical demarcation of territorialization whereby the black body may be ‘legitimately’ presenced as a problematic body” (2013: 174). For
Trayvon Martin, the act of walking in a quiet Florida suburban community, talking to his girlfriend on a cellphone, and wearing a hoodie while Black were enough to make him a “suspicious looking guy” (Ibid., 176). This is a paradigmatic example of how “[w]hen viewed from the perspective of antiblack racism, the body represents an ontology of threat that is no longer contingent upon any action or behavior” (Ibid., 175).7
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All of these testimonies and descriptions of what it is like to exist as
Black, and in most instances, male8 in America will be important to keep in mind below where I make the case that the harm of such an existence is ontological in that it penetrates the very structure of one’s existence in the world. But in order to make this claim, first we must be familiar with some of the psychological and physiological effects of existing as racially oppressed.
Thus, in the next section I review some of the literature on ST.
II
Stereotype threat (ST) refers to the worry, concern, or anxiety commonly felt by members of minority groups that they will confirm and/or be evaluated in terms of negative stereotypes of their group (Steele, 1997; Steele and Aronson, 1995; Steele, 2010). It occurs when someone is from a group that is negatively stigmatized in a certain context, when one is in that context, and when one’s group membership is made salient. 9 The first experiment that studied ST put Black college freshman and sophomores in a context in which their intelligence was being tested by examining how they performed on standardized tests. When their race was made salient to them before the test, Black students consistently performed worse than white students; however, when it was not, the two groups performed equivalently (Steele &
Aronson 1995). It is important to underscore the point that ST affects how members of minority groups think of themselves (and not how they are judged or evaluated by others10). But, as Goff and Richardson make clear, ST “is not a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy, in that one need not endorse negative stereotypes about one’s group in order to be affected by them” (2013: 63).
That is, ST occurs without subjects necessarily or consciously believing that the stereotypes about them are true. Moreover, ST does not require that those in dominant positions have bad intentions or hold explicitly prejudiced or racist beliefs (Steele, 2010: 42). In fact, the literature confirms that ST most often occurs in the absence of these factors.
As I have already mentioned, those who experience ST consistently underperform on relevant tasks. Studies have shown, for example, that ST curbs learning, memory, academic performance (on tests, exams, discussions, debates), and that it reduces motivation (Taylor & Walton, 2011; Rydell et al. 2010; Yeager & Walton 2011; Davies et al. 2000). It also negatively affects peoples’ expectations of themselves, self-esteem, and work habits (Ibid., 17).
Underperformance on relevant tasks occurs because when placed in situations where one’s group membership is made salient, one becomes unconsciously preoccupied by anxiety about demonstrating and confirming stereotypes of one’s group (Steele 2010; Steele, Spencer, & Aronson, 2002). As a result, one’s cognitive energies are directed away from the task at hand and toward
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worrying about confirming stereotypes, the consequences of doing so, and about how to beat stereotypes.
Although I have mentioned studies that deal with ST in academic settings, in this paper, I am interested in a much wider range of contexts in which ST occurs. Such contexts arise on a daily basis, for example, in job interviews, while performing one’s job, negotiating a loan, trying to rent an apartment, interacting with a shopkeeper, getting stopped by the police, or crossing a border. In sum, ST can occur in any situation in which one’s intelligence, proficiency, innocence, or credibility is at stake, and in any one of these contexts, ST “downwardly constitutes” (Steele 2010: 27–28) that person. Moreover, when these factors are combined with implicit and explicit biases of those in dominant positions, the repercussions for minorities are exacerbated even further.
What concerns me most here are the compounded psychological and physiological stresses that victims of ST suffer and in particular, when such stresses become embodied. In order to understand what it means for stresses to become embodied, let me briefly mention the phenomenological distinction between the body as a physiological entity (Körper) and the body as lived body (Leib). Whereas the physiological body refers to the physical body as an object of natural scientific study; the lived body refers to the body as a living subject, focusing on the experiential characterization of individual bodies inthe-world. Although I can experience my body as a physiological entity, that is not the only way that I experience it and often it is not the most primary way that I experience it. Whereas the former refers to the physiological states and changes that bodies undergo, embodiment refers to the existential dimension of bodies in the world. As Thomas Csordas writes, “[i]f embodiment is an existential condition in which the body is the subjective source or intersubjective ground of experience, then studies under the rubric of embodiment are not ‘about’ the body per se. Instead they are about culture and experience insofar as these can be understood from the standpoint of bodily being-inthe-world” (1999: 143).
What it means for stresses such as the ones mentioned above to become embodied is that they become a part of one’s daily existence in ways that manifest themselves through one’s bodily existence and comportment in the world. That is, the stresses become a part of how one exists in the world.
Fears of confirming stereotypes can manifest themselves both consciously and unconsciously. They manifest themselves consciously in anxiety of which subjects are aware and they manifest themselves unconsciously in a subject’s elevated heart rate, increased blood pressure, and in anxiety of which subjects are unaware.11 Importantly, the compounded physiological consequences of
ST can also have both immediate and long-term consequences (Steele 2010:
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119ff).12 Claude Steele describes some of the immediate and long-term psychological, practical, and social consequences of ST for Black people:
The psyche of individual blacks gets damaged…by bad images of the group projected in society – images of blacks as aggressive, as less intelligent, and so on. Repeated exposure to these images causes these images to be ‘internalized,’ implicitly accepted as true of the group and, tragically, also perhaps of one’s self. This internalization damages ‘character’ by causing low self-esteem, low expectations, low motivation, self-doubt and the like. And in turn, this damage contributes to a host of bad things, such as high unemployment, poor marriage success, low educational achievement and criminality
(2010: 46).

In addition to these consequences, the experience of stress following racebased discrimination is also physiologically damaging. It is associated with hypertension in African Americans13 and in the long term, African Americans are also prone to the burden of chronic stress brought on by discrimination.14
All of these factors impact one’s general quality of life and leisure (Phillips
1998). Steele elaborates further upon some other long-term physiological effects of ST:
[I]f people are under threats from stereotypes or other identity contingencies for long periods, they may pay a tax. The persistent extra pressure may undermine their sense of well-being and happiness, as well as contribute to health problems caused by prolonged exposure to the physiological effects of the threat. And all the while…they may have little awareness that they are paying this tax (2010: 127).

As the literature shows from the wide range of contexts in which ST occurs, it affects most, if not all, stigmatized minorities (in one context or another).
Moreover, ST is not just a one-off occurrence; rather, it is persistent in various different contexts of one’s life in which one is a stigmatized minority and in which one’s status is made salient. The effects of ST are not just momentary or “skin deep” but rather are enduring and harmful. It is within this context that I claim that the effects of ST become embodied. Insofar as these harms become embodied, they are present to and remain with one as a background context, condition, or lens through which one’s own self, others, and the world are experienced. As we have seen, in certain contexts this background condition is salient to the one experiencing it (such as with elevated heart rate, and anxiety of which one is aware), but in other contexts, it is not (such as in high blood pressure and anxiety of which one is not aware). When such physiological stresses become embodied the harms of ST become especially problematic since this kind of background context becomes normalized as
“the way things are for me in the world;” they constitute one’s world. Insofar
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as all of this is the case, we can see another way in which the harms of ST are embodied and enduring.
In his book Whistling Vivaldi, Claude Steele compellingly shows that “as an unrecognized factor in our lives, [ST] can contribute to some of our most vexing personal and social problems” (2010: 11). He does not, however, develop this point in an ontological direction, but this is what I would like to do in the final section of this paper. As I show, the existential, psychological, physiological and embodied dimensions of existing in-the-world as racially oppressed have ontological implications in that they effect the structures that constitute one’s existence in-the-world and therefore, the ways in which one exists in the world.
III
Keeping in mind the testimonies and descriptions of what it is like to exist as a Black person in America from Section I, and the physiological and embodied effects of such an existence from Section II, I argue that existing as racially oppressed changes the ontological structure of one’s being-in-the-world.
My point of departure for making this claim is based upon Heidegger’s account of attunement that purports to provide insight into the fundamental structures of existence. My analysis proves to be both good news and bad news for Heidegger’s account. The good news is that his account of attunement as a basic ontological structure through which the world is made present to us and through which we experience the world gets at something that is correct.
The bad news is that he is mistaken in his claim that ontological structures are uniform for everyone. 15 If we take seriously what it is like to exist in the world as racially oppressed, then it becomes clear that Heidegger’s claim about the uniformity of ontological structures must be modified to be more of a social ontological account. Nevertheless, an importantly modified and developed account of his notion of attunement can help us to understand the ontological harm of racial oppression.
Heidegger discusses the ontological structures of human existence in his magnum opus, Being and Time. In this text he undertakes a project that he calls fundamental ontology (FO). This project is motivated by an attempt to answer what he considers to be one of the most basic, important, yet overlooked questions in the history of philosophy, namely, “what is the meaning of Being?” or, “what does it mean to be?” In order to answer this question,
Heidegger begins by embarking upon an existential analysis: a consideration of the only kind of being for whom the question of the meaning of Being arises, namely, human beings. In an all-encompassing, groundbreaking attempt to reconceptualize the way that subjectivity has been understood within the western philosophical tradition – that is, as rational, autonomous, internal
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consciousness separated from the world – Heidegger rethinks what it means for human beings to exist in the world prior to their conceptualization as something separate from it. His starting point is to understand how human beings exist in the world by understanding them not as subject or agent but rather as Dasein (which means, quite literally, to be-here, to be-there, or, being-here or being-there). In his attempt to understand what it means for
Dasein to exist in the world, Heidegger distinguishes between and simultaneously considers two levels of analysis of Dasein: the ontic and the ontological.
Whereas the ontic level refers to beings and their experiences in the world, the ontological level refers to the structures that make these experiences possible.
Heidegger is not consistent, but according to him there are either three or four necessary and basic ontological structures of human existence: understanding
(Verstehen), discourse (Rede), fallenness (Verfallenheit), and attunement
(Befindlichkeit).16 In what follows, I will only be concerned with attunement.
Heidegger’s claim is that Dasein is constituted ontologically by its relationships to other beings and to entities in the world (what he calls Mitsein, or, being-with). What it means for Dasein to exist with others in the world is to be attuned to others, to itself, and to the world within a social, political, and historical context. Attunement is an ontological structure that manifests itself ontically through mood.17 That is, we do not experience ontological structures directly; rather, we only experience them through their ontic manifestations.
Thus, we would say that Dasein is attuned (to the world, to itself, and to others) through its moods. Because attunement is an ontological structure
(namely, a condition for the possibility of experience and existence in the world), we are always attuned through mood. Being attuned is ontologically significant in that attunement is the condition for the possibility of anything appearing or mattering to us. It is by being attuned through mood that the world, others, and we ourselves become present to ourselves. In other words, being attuned through mood is like a permanent, anchored lens through which all of our experiences and thoughts are made present to us. The way that we are attuned shapes and to an extent, even determines, our experiences and thus, our existence in the world.
For Heidegger, ontological structures are permanent, unchanging, and uniform for all human beings and it is only the ontic mode, manifestation, or content of these structures that can change (Heidegger, 1962: §5). In other words, every Dasein has the same structure of attunement – in that attunement is a condition for the possibility of existence in the world – whereas the way in which one is attuned through a specific mood can change according to context. To claim that ontological structures are uniform, permanent, and unchanging, however, is problematic. It is particularly problematic with regards to the issue of oppression since it assumes an ontological uniformity among individuals, which, as I will show below, is false. In fact, Franz Fanon put
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his finger on this very problem when, in Black Skin, White Masks, he writes the following:
Any ontology is made impossible in a colonized and acculturated society. Apparently, those who have written on the subject have not taken this sufficiently into consideration. In the weltanschauung of a colonized people, there is an impurity or a flaw that prohibits any ontological explanation…Ontology does not allow us to understand the being of the black man since it ignores the lived experience. For not only must the black man be black; he must be black in relation to the white man (2008: 89–90).

Fanon is indeed correct with regards to Heidegger’s FO: ontology in a colonized society or in relation to oppressed people is not possible insofar as traditionally understood, ontological structures do not allow for, nor do they take into account, important differences in the experiences of people who occupy different positions of power, nor do they consider the contexts in which oppressed people exist. But these aspects of human existence are not simply accidental or superficial contingencies, rather they cut to the core of human being-in-the-world and affect and even determine the ways in which one can exist in and experience the world. When considering uniform, universal, and immutable ontological structures like Heidegger’s, it is not possible to make the case that experiences of oppression are fundamental to oppressed individuals and not just accidental or merely ontic. For Heidegger, the very point of fundamental ontology is to understand what it means for any human being to exist in the world but implicitly (he does not say this, but nevertheless, it is still a consequence of his system), his notion of Dasein refers only to those who occupy a dominant social position and not to those who are oppressed. In other words, Heidegger’s paradigm of Dasein is the European, white, free man.18 This is because his system does not allow for the possibility that on the ontological level (the level pertaining to the structure of human existence) there can be differences – in race, gender, sexuality, physical or cognitive ability – that elude the structures he sets out as basic or fundamental to human existence. But to assume this kind of ontological uniformity among individuals is both problematic and harmful, as Fanon astutely notes, since such a scheme precludes experiences of oppressed groups from being ontologically accounted for, understood, or significant. It omits the social dimension of ontological accounts. The consequence of such a Heideggerian picture of human existence is that experiences of oppression just happen to occur, or might occur sometimes, but are not systematic, systemic, ubiquitous, or fundamental in any way to those who experience them. That is, they are merely ontic: they do not have any ontological status, nor do they have any ontological effect on what it means to exist as racially oppressed in a normatively white world.
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Not only is this picture problematic and wrong, it is also harmful. It dismisses the enduring and penetrating harms of those who experience the world as oppressed as merely something ontic and thus as somehow not fundamental to who they are and who they can become. To be racialized as Black is historically accidental; it did not have to be. But now that one has been racialized as such, such an existence has fundamental social ontological implications for how one understands oneself, how one feels in the world, how one comports one’s body, what shows up as important or unimportant, and for the chances of dying early.19 To assume that this kind of oppressed existence can only be accounted for and understood on an ontic level is also to assume that it can more easily be changed or eliminated, whereas if living a life as a member of an oppressed group is considered to be an ontological harm (as we will see in a moment), then it can be understood to be more serious and to have deeper, permanent consequences that are not so easily reversible.
The experience of living as a member of a racially oppressed group is not something accidental, contingent, or merely ontic. To live under such conditions cuts to the core of who one is and determines who one can become.
To live under such conditions is not simply a lens through which the world happens to appear, nor is it a lens that can be removed or changed. Rather, to live under such conditions is the lens – the inextricable background context – through which the world appears and it is the determining factor of how one is faring in the world. Living as a member of a racially oppressed group in a normatively white world cuts to the ontological core of what it means to exist since the experiences that constitute what it is like to exist as racially oppressed are not one-off instances but rather are manifest, penetrating, enduring, and as we have seen, they become embodied, taken up into, and constitute who one is. Many people who write about racial oppression mention that the harm accompanying this kind of existence is “ontological”20 but few explain precisely what they mean by that claim. I hope that what I am claiming here can help to shed some light on what it means for such a harm to be ontological. Elsewhere, I write about ontological structures changing for individuals who have suffered violent abuses like rape and torture (cf. Freeman 2015). I make the case that individuals who have suffered in these ways undergo an ontological shift from how they once existed prior to the abuse and torture.
What I mean is that after abuse and torture, these people are ontologically different in the sense that they are attuned to the world differently: the lens through which they experience themselves, the world, and the ways in which objects, people, and contexts become present to them have fundamentally changed. 21 Although she does not use the language of “attunement,” nor does she speak of an “ontological shift,” Susan Brison nevertheless explains this kind of fundamental change within the context of her brutal rape. She
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writes: “People ask me if I’m recovered now, and I reply that it depends on what that means. If they mean ‘am I back to where I was before the attack?’
I have to say, no, and I never will be…Survivors of trauma frequently remark that they are not the same people they were before they were traumatized”
(2003: pp. 21 and 38, my emphasis).
But what I have in mind with regards to ontological structures changing in the context of racial oppression is something slightly different. Here, I am not claiming that the structures have changed for a racially oppressed individual, since that individual has never existed in a wholly dominant social position, 22 nor has he or she ever entirely existed in any way other than as racially oppressed. People who exist as racially oppressed have never experienced the world in ways in which their bodies are not made salient to them as other, deviant, fearful, or guilty. They have never experienced the world such that their future possibilities are not foreclosed on account of their bodily existence. Bringing this point back to Heidegger’s FO, I want to claim that if we take seriously what he means by attunement as an ontological structure, then there must be a difference in the structure itself between those who exist in the world as members of a dominant group, occupying positions of power and those who do not. Heidegger essentialized what it means for
Dasein to exist in the world (although he would not have agreed with my use of the word “essentialied” here), but he was wrong in his assumption that all human beings experience the world through the same, immutable, permanent structure. Racially oppressed people have altogether different ontological attunements than those who occupy dominant social positions. In my interpretation and development of Heidegger’s account, I am expanding his notion of ontology to encompass more of a social ontological account and given the relationship for Heidegger between the ontic and ontological dimensions of existence, this move is justified.
For Heidegger, what it means to exist as Dasein is to have possibilities open to one, to be oriented to the world via ontological structures that manifest themselves ontically. But Heidegger did not consider what it means to exist as racially oppressed and how that fundamentally shifts the way the world appears to or is made present to one, the ways that other people comport themselves to one, and subsequently, the ways that one understands oneself and comports oneself to the world. Recalling the testimonies and descriptions of what it is like to exist as a Black person in America from Section I, my claim is that when one’s existence in the world is reduced and reified to that of a social danger, violent threat, subperson, or criminal based on the color of one’s skin, then this not only affects both how others see and act toward one, and how one comes to see oneself and act in the world, but it also affects how the world is for that person. All of these factors come to shape who that person is, who that person is able to become, and the nature of the (social)
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world that person inhabits. Insofar as these structures shape who one is and who one is able to become, they fundamentally shape one’s ontological constitution: one’s being-in-the-world. In sum, to exist as racially oppressed means to have a different ontological constitution on account of one’s social position.
There is a deep sense in which the world one inhabits as racially oppressed is an altogether different world than the one that someone in a dominant position inhabits.23 One way in which this is the case is that for members of racially oppressed groups the world is not made present to them as a set of open possibilities as it is for Dasein as understood by Heidegger. Rather the world is made present to them as a set of possibilities that are preemptively foreclosed from the outset (or not even present at all). This is on account of a multilayered set of complicated and interrelated reasons that (to name a few) combine the social-historical context in which one lives; structural and systemic prejudices that have been inherited from that history; attitudes, both implicit and explicit, that result from those prejudices; and general and allencompassing roadblocks to one’s ability to navigate and function in the world as one who exists in a white racist dominant position.
Such roadblocks are not accidental, 24 nor can they be easily overcome, nor are they even within one’s power to overcome (most of the time), given that they are structural, systematic, and historically inherited. Rather, such roadblocks structure how the world is made present to one, how one is treated, how one experiences the world, and one’s future possibilities. Thus, I want to claim that they fundamentally shape the ontological structure of one’s existence in the world. To borrow from Dilan Mahendran who is writing in a slightly different, yet related context, it can be said that such roadblocks “predelineate the exterior horizons of what is possible and what to anticipate in an anti-black world” (2007: 198). My claim is that the ontological structures of those who exist as racially oppressed are at stake here because one cannot talk about the structure of one’s being-in-the-world in the absence of how the world is made present to one, or in other words, in the absence of the lens through which the world is made present.
If we take seriously what it is like to exist as a member of a racially oppressed group, then we can see that Heidegger was wrong to think that ontological structures are permanent and uniform for all human beings. The experiences of those who exist as racially oppressed give us one example of the way in which ontological structures differ depending on one’s bodily existence and one’s position of social power. We have seen how racially oppressed people are attuned to the world in fundamentally different ways than those who occupy dominant positions of social power and how, for the former, the world discloses itself to them in fundamentally different ways. To use Heidegger’s language, Dasein’s existence is determined on the basis of its thrownness, that is, the historical and social context in which one always
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already finds oneself in the world. On the basis of this thrownness, one is projected into future possibilities. But when one is thrown into a world in which one’s future possibilities are foreclosed, this affects the ontological structure of one’s being. As Yancy writes:
Within the white imaginary, to be Black means to be born an obstacle at the very core of one’s being. To ex-ist as Black is not
‘to stand out’ facing an ontological horizon filled with future possibilities of being other than what one is. Rather, being Black negates the ‘ex’ of existence. Being Black is reduced to facticity…As Black
I am no project at all (2008: 87).

Before concluding, I would like to raise and respond to an important objection.
In this paper, I have claimed that existing as racially oppressed constitutes an ontological harm. To suffer this kind of harm means that the structure of one’s being is different from those who are not racially oppressed. It also means that to an extent, one who is racially oppressed lives in a different world from those who occupy dominant social positions, and who can navigate freely without facing insurmountable physiological, psychological, and existential roadblocks. But one might object that to claim such an ontological difference based on being racially oppressed is precisely to reinstate a kind of ontological otherness and ontological inferiority of those who are racially oppressed and that this just reinforces the very harm that I am trying to fight against.
My response to this objection is that we must be clear about the kind of ontological constitution at stake here. As I mentioned above, I am expanding a more traditional notion of ontology to encompass a sociohistorically constituted ontology that is “neither essentialist, innate, nor transhistorical” (Mills,
1998: xiv). One way of understanding this sociohistorically constituted ontology is that the sociohistorically constituted structures of racial oppression generate differing social locations for members of racialized groups. For example, a person of color occupies a different social location than a white person and this location is constitutive of the individual’s social, cultural, psychological, physiological, and political existence. As Charles Mills writes:
Those termed white have generally had a civil, moral, and juridical standing that has lifted them above other ‘races.’ They have been the expropriators; others have been the expropriated. They have been the slave owners; others have been the slaves. They have been the colonizers; others have been the colonized. They have been the settlers; others have been the displaced. So one gets a formal ontological partitioning in the population of the planet, signified by
‘race’ (Ibid.).

If we understand ontology in a sociohistorically constituted sense, then it becomes clear that this project does not reinforce any kind of ontological
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inferiority of racially oppressed groups; rather, I am pointing out the ways in which their existence is constituted by factors that are beyond their control yet that shape their possibilities (or lack thereof) in ways that are significant.25
Understood in this way, the ontological harm caused by racial oppression is potentially reversible and preventable: if personal, social, cultural, and political attitudes were to change, then this type of harm could be alleviated.
In this paper, I considered testimonies and descriptions of some of the existential dimensions of existing as members of racially oppressed groups in a normatively white society. I also looked at some of the physiological and psychological effects of such an existence and how they can become embodied.
This set the framework for me to consider the ontological harm of racial oppression by modifying and developing Heidegger’s account of attunement.
In so doing, I showed how existing as a member of a racially oppressed group changes the ontological structure of one’s being-in-the-world.
NOTES
1. I say that this is a controversial move especially now given the recent publication of Heidegger’s Schwarzen Hefte (Black Notebooks), which bring Heidegger’s anti-Semitism to an entirely new level. While I am no Heidegger apologist, I also do not think that his egregious, despicable, and unforgivable views should entirely discount the importance of all of his philosophical views.
2. The authors use the term “qualitative phenomenology” to refer to their study of people’s perceptions, perspectives, and understandings in a particular situation.
The emphasis of their study focused on people’s first personal understandings of their situation. In other words, the authors attempt to determine what an experience means for the person who has it and who is able to provide a comprehensive description of it (Giorgio 1985; Moustakas 1994).
3. Their sample was located in Topeka, Kansas.
4. You can also see similar situations comparing the treatment of white and Black people while trying to break into their own cars (for example, see here: https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=MuyMuLGXxTs accessed, May 5, 2014) or trying to steal a bike (for example, see here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ge7i60Gu
NRg, accessed May 5, 2014).
5. Both of these incidents exemplify what has been called suspicion cascades, which refer to the greater likelihood of ambiguous actions of non-whites being evaluated as more threatening and suspicious than identical actions performed by whites on account of racial stereotypes of criminality and violence. Suspicion cascades reveal that non-whites face far greater risk of death or serious bodily injury at the hands of those who honestly, but mistakenly, fear them (Goff & Richardson, 2013:
64).
6. I try not to refer to Black people or white people as “Blacks” or “whites” lest I reduce them to their racialized identities; however, in this instance, problems not40

withstanding, there is a certain rhetorical force to “existing as Black in America” that I would like to retain.
7. I am not sure how Polizzi is using “ontology” here but I am sure that he is not using it in the Heideggerian sense, namely, to refer to the condition for the possibility for existing in the world.
8. The reason for my qualification here is because many of the testimonies taken by Birzer and Smith-Mahdi are from Black males and insofar as this is the case, they fail to capture many important experiences that are unique to Black females (i.e., with regards to sexual identity and expression, and sexual discrimination, to name just a few). I make this qualification to flag the fact that there is no such thing as the
Black experience and that the experiences of Black men and Black women will be very different as will experiences of Black men and Black women of different classes, genders, sexual orientations, etc. Notwithstanding these differences, my phenomenology of racial oppression can apply to both Black men and Black women in that it can account for the ways in which their worlds can be constituted differently from one another at the same time from being constituted differently from white men and women.
9. But stereotype threat (ST) can also occur in any minority member of a dominant group. For example, ST has been tested on all of the following groups when they are minorities within a specific context: women, African Americans, white males, Latino
Americans, third-grade American schoolgirls, Asian American students, European males aspiring to be clinical psychologists (under the threat of negative stereotypes about men’s ability to understand feelings), French college students, German grade school girls, U.S. soldiers on army bases in Italy, women business school students, white and black athletes, older Americans. It has been shown to affect many different kinds of performances, for example, math, verbal, analytic, and IQ test performance, golf putting, reaction time performance, language usage, aggressiveness in negotiations, memory performance, the height of athletic jumping (Steele, 2010: 97).
Importantly, in all of these instances no special susceptibility is required in order for a subject to experience the pressure; rather, the only condition that must be met in order for ST to arise is that the subject care about the performance in question (Ibid.,
98).
10. Nevertheless, it must be underscored that ST never occurs in isolation but rather always in broader white racist social conditions, frameworks, and epistemic orders. 11. For more details on an experiment that studied anxiety that was the result of
ST of which subjects were unaware see Steele 2010: 114–118.
12. Moreover, the effects tend to be most severe in those who are most committed to doing well in the area under consideration.
13. See Din-Dzietnam, Nembhard, Collins 2004. For a study examining racial discrimination and distress also see Sellers et al. 2003.
14. Browman et al. 2000; Troxel et al. 2003.
15. At this point, one might object that if ontological structures are different for white people than they are for Black people and that this is not merely a difference in experience but a fundamental difference in how the world can be experienced, then
I, a white woman, cannot write a phenomenological description of Black existence.
Now it is true that I cannot experience first-personally what it is like to exist in a
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Black body. This being the case, I can still understand testimonies of what it is like.
So while I cannot compare Black and white experiences based on my own experiences, there is sufficient first-person evidence to suggest that the ontological structures of experience are substantially different. Thus, as I say below, I am not purporting to make claims about experiences themselves, other than that those experiences are structured differently for white people than they are for Black people, which is what we get from the testimonies of Black people. I would like to thank David Owen for raising this objection and for his helpful discussion on this issue as well as George
Yancy for his helpful thoughts on the matter.
16. It is important to underscore the point that these structures can only be separated in analysis since in existence they are all mutually inclusive.
17. For an account of the relationship between attunement and mood, see Elpidorou 2013, Freeman 2014, Freeman 2015.
18. I do not have the space to address differences in sex and gender and how these also problematize Heidegger’s notion of Dasein. For articles that deal with this problem, see Tina Chanter (2001), “The Problematic Normative Assumptions of
Heidegger’s Ontology,” in N. J. Holland & P. Huntingdon (eds.), Feminist Interpretations of Martin Heidegger, pp. 73–108 (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State
University Press); Jacques Derrida (2001), “Geschlecht: Sexual Difference, Ontological Difference”, in N. J. Holland & P. Huntingdon (eds.), Feminist Interpretations of Martin Heidegger, pp. 53–72 (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State
University Press); Lanai Rodemeyer (1998), “Dasein Gets Pregnant,” Philosophy
Today 42(Special Supplement): pp. 76–84.
19. I would like to thank George Yancy for helping me to elaborate upon this point. 20. Here I have in mind Davis (1998), Yancy (2008), Hart (2013) and Polizzi
(2013), to name just a few. Charles Mills is an important exception. He discusses differences between ontology traditionally construed and ontology as used in critical race theory which is more of a social ontology (Mills, 2008, Preface; also see Mills
2014, especially pp. 25–26 and p. 39 note 2). Another exception is Shannon Sullivan
(2006, see pp. 23, 25, 32, 128).
21. In that context I used testimonies from Susan Brison and Jean Améry to make my point.
22. I qualify this statement to note important intersectional differences between
Black men and Black women. A Black man exists as oppressed qua Black but as oppressor qua male whereas a Black woman does not experience such a partially dominant position compared to a Black man.
23. For a slightly different account of what it means to occupy a different world from the dominant world/culture, see Lugones 1987.
24. By this I mean the following: such roadblocks are not accidental in the sense that they were constructed on purpose; they are accidental in the sense that it is not necessary that things ought to have been constructed in this way. Thanks to George
Yancy for his suggestion on this point.
25. I would like to thank David Owen for helping me to think through this objection.

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Lauren Freeman is an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Louisville. She works on phenomenology, feminist philosophy, and bioethics. Her research has dealt with the themes of recognition, autonomy, selfhood, intersubjectivity, and epistemic injustice in pregnancy and has appeared in journals such as Inquiry, The
Southern Journal of Philosophy, The APA Newsletter on Feminism and Philosophy, Continental Philosophy Review, Philosophy Today, as well as in Hypatia and
The Review of Metaphysics. She is currently co-editing a special issue of the journal
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences on the topic of the phenomenology and science of emotions.
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