By Amel Mohdali
At approximately 12:03 a.m. on October 11, a group of Spelman students walked outside the college’s gates to meet their Uber. According to their account, an ordinary departure escalated into a confrontation in which a security officer repeatedly put his hands on the driver, attempted to pull him from his vehicle, and ultimately arrested him.
The students say they had asked the driver to wait for one more passenger within what they understood to be Uber’s five-minute grace period. They allege that during this period the officer approached the stationary vehicle without first directing him to another pickup location.
The officer requested the driver’s license. When the driver explained that he did not have it on him, the officer allegedly proceeded to touch both of the driver’s pockets.
“Stop, stop touching me. You’re hurting my hand. Stop,” the video shows the driver saying.
They say the driver indicated that he was preparing to leave, but the confrontation continued. The students also allege that the officer threatened them with arrest if they did not follow his instructions.
The officer’s identity and employing agency, the stated grounds for the arrest, and any official incident report remain unconfirmed. These allegations require investigation, including an opportunity for the driver, witnesses, and officer to provide their accounts.
But the questions raised by this encounter extend beyond one officer. They concern whose presence becomes suspicious, whose fear elicits attention, and what happens when the people associated with our protection become a source of intimidation.
They also concern what we should expect from Spelman.
Whose belonging is taken for granted?
The students expressed concern that xenophobia influenced the officer’s reaction and treatment of the driver. They described him as Afro-Latino presenting, although appearance cannot establish someone’s ethnicity, nationality, or immigration status. Their account alone cannot establish the officer’s motive.
That uncertainty requires careful investigation. It should also prompt a broader examination of how we recognize xenophobia.
Xenophobia does not always announce itself through an explicit slur. It can operate through assumptions about who belongs, whose explanation deserves patience, and whose presence immediately requires scrutiny. It can shape how we hear an accent, interpret unfamiliarity, or decide that someone looks out of place.
It can also survive through the explanations people offer afterward: he should have cooperated; he should have known better; there must have been a reason.
Those responses can make the person subjected to force responsible for explaining it away.
On campus, we need to ask whether perceived foreignness changes the patience, dignity, or protection someone receives. We need to examine whether immigrant workers are treated as members of the community or merely as people permitted to provide a service and leave.
Some students may never notice these distinctions because they do not have to navigate them. The absence of xenophobia from one person’s experience does not ensure its absence from everyone else’s.
For students whose lives include migration, displacement, or uncertainty about belonging, an encounter with authority may carry fears that others do not immediately recognize. According to the students’ account, some witnesses with protected immigration status felt threatened by what they saw.
Their fear deserves attention without requiring them to disclose private information or prove that they were personally at risk.
A Black institution that champions a tagline of “A Choice to Change the World” can still reproduce exclusion just outside of its gates.
Spelman’s history matters. Its existence represents generations of Black women’s determination to learn, organize, and build lives within a society that repeatedly denied them those possibilities.
That history gives us a responsibility to examine how power operates here.
A Black institution can reproduce class hierarchy. A women’s college can reproduce patriarchy. A campus that celebrates the African diaspora can still leave African and immigrant students feeling that their belonging is conditional.
Institutional identity does not automatically determine institutional practice.
As a Sudanese student, I want belonging to extend beyond being welcomed as a story of resilience. I want our institutions to understand the grief, uncertainty, and responsibility that can exist beneath that description. Celebrating someone’s ability to survive does not fulfill our responsibility to help them live with dignity.
The same principle applies to the workers who make campus life possible. Drivers, custodians, dining workers, and delivery workers should not have to possess institutional prestige for their treatment to matter.
The question is whether our community’s circle of care extends to people whose labor we rely on but whose experiences we rarely center.
When belonging becomes a competition, conversations about xenophobia must also confront the divisions within the Black diaspora, including the exclusion of African Americans from conversations about African identity and belonging.
Diasporic solidarity cannot require African Americans to prove an attachment to a particular country, speak an African language, or trace a lineage that slavery deliberately ruptured. Treating those losses as evidence of cultural deficiency reproduces the violence that created them. African Americans have built cultures, political traditions, and forms of knowledge that deserve recognition on their own terms.
At the same time, African and Caribbean students should not have to erase their histories, accents, or experiences of displacement to be recognized as part of a Black community. Blackness contains different histories. Belonging should allow us to bring those histories into relationship without arranging them into a hierarchy.
The “diaspora wars” that turn these differences into competitions over authenticity, suffering, or achievement make that work harder. We see that logic whenever African immigrants are held up as evidence that African Americans simply have not worked hard enough, or whenever African Americans are portrayed as disconnected from a continent whose relationship to them was violently disrupted. We also see it when immigrants are treated as outsiders whose experiences have little place in conversations about Black life.
These narratives invite us to explain one another through stereotypes rather than histories. They encourage us to compete for recognition from institutions that should be accountable to all of us.
We must also be honest about unequal positions within the diaspora. Citizenship, class, nationality, language, and access to education can shape our vulnerability differently. Acknowledging those differences gives solidarity substance. It allows us to ask who needs support in a particular moment without turning that need into a contest over who has suffered most.
At Spelman, decolonization should include creating room for these difficult conversations without demanding a single version of Black identity. African American students should feel rooted in an institution shaped by their communities’ struggles and intellectual labor. African, Caribbean, Afro-Latina, and other diasporic students should feel that their presence expands that community and that their experiences matter within it.
That responsibility extends beyond enrolled students. Our commitment to Black dignity must reach the driver at the gate, the worker whose accent marks them as foreign, and the person whose belonging cannot be established through a college affiliation.
If we reproduce the distinction between the people worth protecting and the people who must continually justify their presence, we carry exclusion into a space built through resistance to it. The work is to build a community where our differences deepen our responsibilities to one another.
Security can make coercion feel ordinary.
Institutions often explain their authority through the language of safety. That language deserves scrutiny because it can make almost any intervention appear justified before we know what happened.
Who is being protected? From what? At whose expense? What alternatives were available before physical intervention?
An officer’s presence cannot answer those questions by itself.
The students’ account describes a driver repeatedly asking someone to stop touching him. It describes passengers feeling threatened while witnessing the encounter. Those allegations deserve examination on their own terms, without an automatic assumption that authority must have been exercised appropriately.
In a conversation about campus conditions, one student described security as having been “so aggressive recently.” One observation does not establish a campus-wide pattern. It does create a reason to ask further questions.
What experiences informed that assessment? Have similar concerns been reported? Do students know where to document an encounter? Do they believe anything will happen if they do?
Aggression can become normalized when people begin arranging their behavior around it. We learn whom to avoid, when to remain silent, and which questions might make an encounter worse. Eventually, what once disturbed us becomes something we advise one another to endure.
That adaptation should concern an institution committed to nurturing its students.
Our ability to become accustomed to fear does not make the conditions producing it acceptable.
The distance between the image and the experience.
Spelman knows how to present excellence.
We encounter the language of sisterhood, leadership, service, and social transformation in recruitment materials, ceremonies, fundraising appeals, and celebrations of student achievement. We are encouraged to become women who challenge injustice and change the world.
Yet that encouragement must include room to challenge the institution itself.
As a student, I often feel a distance between Spelman’s public image of nurturing Black women and the care we experience in daily campus life. The institution’s pride in our resilience can feel more visible than its willingness to examine why so much resilience is required.
Nurturing means responding before distress becomes a public controversy. It means listening when students describe an experience that unsettles the institution’s understanding of itself. It means clear communication, accessible support, and follow-through.
It also means allowing us to be frustrated, vulnerable, and unfinished.
Black women should not have to turn every painful experience into an achievement before receiving recognition. We should not have to remain composed enough to protect an institution’s image while asking it to address our concerns.
When students feel heard only after a concern threatens the college’s reputation, optics begin to overshadow care.
I expect more from Spelman because I take its mission seriously. The Black women whose achievements sustain its reputation deserve sustained attention to the conditions under which they live and learn.
Belonging should offer more than survival.
A person can enter a space without feeling safe within it. A student can be enrolled, successful, and publicly celebrated while still feeling unsupported.
That distinction should shape how we understand sanctuary.
A nurturing campus offers room to ask for help without humiliation, question authority without intimidation, and experience difficulty without being treated as an inconvenience. It recognizes that safety includes whether people can speak honestly about their lives.
For students carrying grief, financial insecurity, migration histories, or responsibility for family elsewhere, care requires more than admiration for perseverance. It requires attention to what that perseverance costs.
We should be able to expect an institution to help relieve those burdens where it can. Our accomplishments cannot serve as proof that we have already received everything we need.
Decolonizing Spelman requires sharing power.
Decolonization must reach the everyday arrangements through which a campus governs people.
Who writes the rules? Who can challenge them? Whose testimony changes a decision? Who bears the consequences when a policy fails?
At Spelman, that work would include meaningful student influence over security practices, accessible complaint procedures, and a clear connection between reported concerns and institutional action. It would include workers in conversations about campus wellbeing. It would allow international and immigrant students to shape support systems rather than appear primarily as evidence of institutional diversity.
It would also require confronting the relationship between respectability and control.
Students can disagree with authority while remaining deserving of care. Workers can misunderstand a procedure while remaining deserving of patience. A person’s imperfect response to a stressful encounter does not erase the institution’s responsibility to examine how its personnel behaved.
An education in liberation should give us the tools and the opportunity to question these arrangements here.
What accountability requires now.
The immediate responsibilities are concrete. Spelman should clarify which agency employed the officer involved in the October 11 encounter and who is responsible for reviewing it. Relevant footage, reports, and other records should be preserved. The driver and student witnesses should have an accessible way to submit their accounts.
The review should examine the alleged physical contact, attempts to remove the driver from the vehicle, and threats directed toward students. Findings and corrective measures should be communicated as fully as privacy obligations allow.
Beyond this encounter, students need meaningful opportunities to document their experiences with security and participate in evaluating campus practices. Listening must lead somewhere: to decisions, explanations, timelines, and changes where they are warranted.
We are routinely asked to represent Spelman well. We should be able to expect the institution to care for us with the same seriousness it brings to protecting its name.
Generations of Black women have invested their labor, imagination, and hope in this college. Asking it to meet the weight of that history is part of our responsibility to one another.
If Spelman prepares us to change the world, our own gates must remain open to that work.
