To Bathe or Not To Bathe

In the news today is this headline:

“Lawsuit: Nigerian woman kicked off United flight to SFO after white man complained about her smell”

Another black eye for United Airlines, whose reputation for customer service has not been helped lately by being in the news. The woman charges the airline with racial discrimination because she is black and the man who complained is white, so what else could it be but racism?

I can take an educated guess as to what else it might be. The airplane was flying from Houston to San Francisco, so it is safe to assume that most of the passengers were American. The “smelly” passenger was African.

It’s a fact that bathing customs vary around the world, according to the culture in that part of the world. In some African countries people don’t bathe every day and so to an American nose they may stink. Likewise, in some European countries people don’t bathe every day. The French are known for having body odor. A French doctor in Saint-Cloud says, “For many of us (French doctors), the deodorant spray is a tool of the trade at least as important as the stethoscope.” The doctor, practicing in one of the wealthiest Paris suburbs, complained he dealt with unwashed bodies every day of his life. Edouard Zarifian, an eminent French psychologist, said that for the French, “eating and drinking are natural functions. Washing is not.”

This is not meant to disparage the French (or any other culture) but only to point out that bathing customs vary from place to place. I once worked with a young man who was a Vietnamese refugee, and every day his garlicky body odor was enough to almost knock me down. I’m sure he smelled fine to his family. A friend who took classes in an international art school complained about Algerian students in his class who smelled like they had never bathed. I’ve read that in recent years Britons are smellier than the French, though that may have less to do with bathing than the fact that the French are Europe's biggest consumers of perfume and deodorants.

Maybe this event — getting “kicked off” a plane for being smelly — is not about race but about old-fashioned smelly body odor. Maybe the woman really did smell bad but, because she is from a very different culture, she didn’t know that she smelled bad to American noses. Not everything is about race. If you stink, I don’t want to sit beside you for several hours in a crowded metal tube with poor ventilation, regardless of your skin color. Just maybe, that is all this story is about.