The idea of philosophy conjures images of old books and abstract debates. It tends to also be associated with the educated classes and privileged elites. I grew up in West Baltimore where I experienced homelessness for almost the entirety of high school. For me, philosophy emerged in situations of precarity and uncertainty. Those formative years, spent not so much in a single home as in a patchwork of many, shaped what are now some of my central philosophical concerns: belonging, exclusion, and the status of those at the margins of society, those at the threshold of belonging. What I want to explain here is how philosophy can, for the marginalized of society, be concrete and tactile, woven into gestures, silences, and the gritty details of daily survival; an activity that is bonded to the world, not a conjectural one that is cloistered from it. 

I. Exclusion and belonging.

Growing up as the family “stray,” I was often the one being dropped off and picked up. Shuffled between relatives, I could feel that my presence was tolerated more as an obligation than as a joy. My interest in books, science, or whatever was my newest curiosity was barely acknowledged, often regarded as a mild inconvenience. Against the background of kitchen tables cluttered with bills, I understand why I was treated this way, but as a child, it required me to become adept at reading the coded signals that marked spaces as welcoming or forbidding. I learned to recognize the quiet hospitality of a meal offered for no reason, as well as the chill of a door quietly but firmly shut. I was introduced to a skill many children in similar situations have to learn, of finding refuge in the little things. 

I remember one Christmas at my Aunt Lisa’s house, while other children enjoyed their piles of gifts, my own, smaller offerings, were the result of Aunt Lisa’s quiet generosity. I remember afternoons spent at her house, the smell of oils lingering in the air as she braided hair, and the low thrum of adult gossip forming a kind of protective cocoon around us. I remember riding in the battered Pontiac 6000, my Uncle Scooby at the wheel, teaching me how to move through a world that didn’t always make room for people like us. There was Aunt C’mell, whose encouragement and warmth lasted in my heart far longer than she likely realized. I remember doing construction jobs and taking crabbing trips with Uncle Parris. I remember my grandfather Smitty, a crucial anchor in those shifting years, always with a saying or quip for the situation.

When all else failed, I found refuge, too, in the home of my kindergarten teacher. Even in my teenage years, when I should have outgrown such need, I gravitated back to her for wisdom, a kind word, or even a clean place to stay.

These were all fragments of normalcy stitched together into a makeshift sense of family, the small things, as Curtis Mayfield sang, which are “the makings of you.” When people speak of a village raising a child, I am living proof: my life was shaped by a group effort, passed from hand to hand. 

But these everyday havens faded with time. Grandfather Smitty, who had been a steady ballast in my turbulent childhood, declined in health. My aunts’ lives changed. My grandmother’s attention shifted to younger grandchildren. The tension simmering at home with my mother finally boiled over, and by fourteen, I was kicked out. For months, I bounced from one relative’s couch to another and slept at high school girlfriends’ houses. By fifteen, I landed in a leaky, rat-infested house, living by myself, enduring a winter without heat or hot water. 

But life’s currents have a way of carrying us into unexpected harbors. To make it through this situation, I soon found myself being helped by people whom society brands as criminals and outcasts, gangsters and drug dealers, prostitutes, and people who were addicted to drugs. Even as I braced myself, wary and uncertain, most did not hesitate to extend unbidden care and kindness, or to share their wisdom forged from hardship without reservation. From this unexpected solidarity, I learned that the boundaries I had been taught to fear could instead be invitations to see the human stories unfolding everywhere, particularly in the places most people overlook. 

In all of these small kindnesses, a warm plate from an aunt, a shared laugh with an uncle, the steady presence of a teacher, I now see Kristie Dotson’s conception of hospitality. In her view, hospitality is not mere politeness, but a radical form of acknowledgment, a way of seeing and honoring another’s existence without trying to control or reshape it. True hospitality, Dotson suggests, lies in making space for another’s story, in resisting the urge to render the unfamiliar familiar too quickly. 

To be unwelcome, then, is to be forced to the threshold between these two worlds to be compelled to confront not only how others see us, but how we see ourselves. 

Without realizing it, I had also stumbled upon what Jean Paul Sartre understood as the problem of “bad faith.” Sartre’s concept of bad faith describes the ways we contort ourselves to fit others’ expectations, performing versions of ourselves that we never quite feel at home. I knew that performance intimately, adapting, shrinking, or expanding to fit the demands of each new situation, always aware of the invisible boundaries that determined who was welcome and who was not. Later, I realized that my circumstances implied a brutal question for the marginalized within a Sartrean framework, of what freedom can mean when bad faith is a requirement of your survival, which Sartre sees as inauthenticity. 

II. Philosophy and marginality.      

My story, full of detours and makeshift homes, is the norm in many communities. I know it is echoed in the lives of countless others who have wandered by necessity or by choice through life’s in-between spaces. These thresholds, both literal and metaphorical, became my classrooms. I learned to ask: What does it mean to belong? Can the experience of exclusion cultivate empathy, or does it simply harden us against the world? When we persist in places that reject us, do we change those places, or do they change us? These are not merely academic questions; they play out in classrooms, workplaces, neighborhoods, and families, shaping the texture of daily life. 

Looking back, then, I realize that the margins, the places where belonging is uncertain and the rules are made visible, are where philosophy comes most alive. It’s in these spaces that we are compelled to ask the hardest questions, to invent new forms of resilience and hospitality, and to recognize the dignity of every story. Far from the lecture halls, philosophical questions first came calling on me in the modest corners of everyday acts of survival. Yet those questions that haunted my childhood were not so different from those which occupied Plato, or that sent Kierkegaard wandering the streets of Copenhagen: What is justice? What does it mean to love or to be loved? How do we live when the rules seem rigged, and when belonging itself feels provisional, always subject to review? 

It was through suffering, exclusion, and uncertainty that I became, almost by necessity, an everyday philosopher. I was forced to grapple with questions that had no easy answers. Was I, as Sartre suggested, merely the sum of my choices, or was I being shaped by forces beyond my control? In my story, and the stories of those who cared for me when no one else would, I discovered the necessity of what Kristie Dotson terms “epistemic resilience,” the capacity not just to survive hardship, but to generate meaning and wisdom from it. As Dotson reminds us, those excluded from the center are not without knowledge or value; they are often the most creative architects of survival, the quiet philosophers who teach us what it means to persist. Dotson’s work on the lived experiences of those at the margins reminds us that knowledge isn’t just something found in books, but something grown from surviving and persisting in the face of exclusion. She writes about the importance of “quiet courage,” that stubborn insistence on one’s own truth even when the world refuses to listen. Indeed, a core lesson of what has come to be called the philosophy born of struggle, is that the margins are not just places of lack, but fertile grounds for creativity, resourcefulness, and new forms of understanding. 

This lesson also resonates deeply with the life and thought of a thinker who has been one of the central pillars of my own work, Malcolm X. His life, marked by displacement, incarceration, and transformation, is a testament to the search for meaning and dignity in a world that often denies these to Black Americans. Malcolm X insisted that “education is our passport to the future,” and his relentless pursuit of self-knowledge was both an act of defiance and a source of empowerment. He taught that resilience is not passive endurance, but an ongoing process of self-definition, a refusal to accept the boundaries imposed by others. In his life and thought, he demonstrates that the journey from exclusion to belonging is not a straight line, but a series of trials, reinventions, and acts of courage. His willingness to question everything, to embrace change even at great personal cost, spoke to the same philosophical hunger I felt as a homeless teenager: a desire to carve out a space in the world that was truly my own. 

III. The Threshold.

The rough edges of my early life never smoothed into certainty, but they made me more attentive to complexity, more willing to recognize the invisible boundaries of class, race, and belonging that define who gets to belong, and who is left standing at the threshold. In this awareness, I see the value of resilience not as stoicism or mere endurance, but as a creative practice. Going beyond epistemic resilience, I here want to call attention to resilience in an existential sense, as the ability to persist, to adapt, to find pockets of warmth and hope. This aspect of resilience is not a grand or heroic posture, and not simply about bouncing back. It is an everyday discipline of finding concrete ways to keep moving forward, of inventing new particularistic forms of belonging, and refusing to let the harshness of circumstances define your sense of self. It is the art of assembling meaning from scraps, of finding connection in the unlikeliest places, and of refusing to be defined by exclusion. Borrowing from the Chicano poet Jimmy Santiago Baca, it is how we find ways “to go on living inside, when the world outside no longer cares if you live or die.”

So, philosophy in everyday life is about more than books or arguments. It’s about finding wisdom in the margins, about noticing those who have been overlooked, and about learning from them the art of survival and the practice of resilience. It is a call to radical attention, to hospitality, and to the ongoing work of expanding the boundaries of who gets to belong.

This is not an attempt at recycling the cliche that suffering makes us better or stronger by default. It doesn’t—not always. I hope it is also clear that this kind of practical resilience may not necessarily offer generalizable principles of action. Rather, my suggestion is that suffering, when met with humility, and the courage to keep asking questions, can become a source of solidarity, empathy, and hope, not necessarily certainty. The margins become not just sites of exclusion, but horizons of possibility. As the poet Rilke encourages, the task is not to demand solutions, but to have the courage to inhabit uncertainty. But the crucial thing is that, in navigating that terrain, we become not only better philosophers, but builders of new worlds, one threshold at a time.