On the Crime of Traveling While Brown
Posted by Ethan Casey on January 12, 2010 · 4 Comments
For more than twenty years travel has been a purpose, a vocation, for me. More than a pastime or a job requirement, it’s simply what I do, and I could tell you why. Maybe I will sometime. For now suffice it to say that, as a reporter, I endorse my colleague Anthony Davis’s observation that “There’s no substitute for the sniff on the ground.” Reading books and crunching numbers are necessary activities, but they can’t substitute for the simple act of showing up and bearing witness.
Which is why I’ve always kept a wary lookout for anything that might limit my freedom to travel. In the 1990s, that time of innocence and excess, I cherished my blue passport and made good use of it as I bounced incessantly around Asia. The world was my oyster in those pre-9/11 days, and I saw every reason to hurry up and explore it. In the middle-class, middle American world I come from, many people – albeit, to their credit, not my parents – tend to see youthful wanderlust in terms of “getting it out of your system” before “settling down.” Put money in the bank now, is the idea, and then when you retire you’ll be able to travel (i.e. go on cruises and/or drive around America in an RV). I considered that mentality myopic and parochial even at the time. Now I really do. As I told a younger journalist colleague recently, the older I get, the more I feel vindicated in the reckless choices I made in my youth.
The thing is, if you get with the program and keep your nose clean, you don’t get rewarded in any terms that I value. More directly to the point, the only good reason to have freedom is to use it, now. Later, you might not have it anymore.
All of which is to say that I’m very glad I did as much traveling as I did in my twenties and thirties, because I wonder how free I, or anyone, will be to travel in the looming future. In Asia, in the good old days, I learned that not only was my blue passport an asset to cherish, but so was my white skin. There were times when I was insouciant and oblivious about it, but I did figure it out. It’s not fair, but it’s true, and it’s a privilege I no longer take lightly. Along with the relative freedom I enjoy – to be blunt, freedom to board airplanes with relatively little fear of being subjected to a humiliating interrogation or full-body search – comes a responsibility to try to speak for people who can’t or, out of fear, won’t speak for themselves.
As I’ve traveled in recent years among the affluent, law-abiding, family values-ish, even boringly suburban denizens of Pakistani North America, I’ve been told many stories, privately, about what they go through when they travel into and out of, and around, the United States. I might compile some of these stories sometime, but for now suffice it to say that not many white people I know would stand for what brown people – U.S. and Canadian citizens – put up with routinely and largely without complaint.
Now, since the “underwear bomber” was foiled on Christmas Day at the airport in Detroit – after inexplicably having been allowed to board without screening in Amsterdam – the New York Times reports:
WASHINGTON — Citizens of 14 nations, including Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Nigeria, who are flying to the United States will be subjected indefinitely to the intense screening at airports worldwide that was imposed after the Christmas Day bombing plot, Obama administration officials announced Sunday.
But American citizens, and most others who are not flying through those 14 nations on their way to the United States, will no longer automatically face the full range of intensified security that was imposed after the attempted bombing of a Northwest Airlines flight, officials said.
There’s plenty more to say about this development, and I’ll be sure to continue covering the issue of travel restrictions in this weekly blog. For now, I have to get ready for my daily Urdu class, so I’ll leave it at this: It’s all well and good for white people to say things like, “I don’t mind a bit of inconvenience if it’s making us safer” or “If you’re not doing anything wrong, you shouldn’t have anything to fear,” but we don’t know – literally, we don’t know – what brown people are going through. And it really is largely a matter of skin color; these are in many cases our fellow U.S. and Canadian citizens and taxpayers. The least we white people can do is to cultivate an awareness of our position of privilege, and that awareness should teach us a measure of humility.
As usual, the prophetic voices of our time come from marginal communities, where experience tends to be all too directly edifying. Here’s what Haroon Khan, trustee of the Pakistan-Canada Association and the Al-Jamia mosque in Vancouver, said on the Bill Good Show on CKNW radio on January 6: “The amount of security that we’re facing is quite intense, and the full-body scanning really represents a tremendous intrusion on the privacy of all of us in the name of security. … It’s really a dangerous precedent that’s being set and it’s a line that, once we cross it, I’m afraid it’s just the beginning.”
Bon voyage! I welcome your comments on this and any other posts on this blog.
Well said, Ethan. More people need to speak up about the discrimination and invasion of privacy. It may start with “brown” people, but it won’t stop there. The personal liberties we allowed to be taken away under Bush are still missing under Obama. And few people are speaking up. Keep up the good work.
Nice post. As someone who recently returned from a trip to Pakistan (though this was before Christmas), I can attest to the fact that 99% of people being screened “at random” are brown. Anyone else is just there to keep things civil.
Being a young man, I don’t mind it much and have come to expect it but I really felt sorry for the families that were being held at the airport. Little kids, babies, mothers. It’s sad to see.
More and more browns that I speak to are willing to concede their rights, their argument being that they are just as scared of another terrorist attack as a non-brown. This sounds like a rational argument to me but I always ask them, “What’s the next thing you’d be willing to give up?”.
This really is “just the beginning”, but, if anything, these are interesting times to be young, male, brown and living in America.
Ethan
While I agree that full body scanning is an invasion of privacy, overkill and unnecessary I do believe that we have to be “smart” about security and target who is most likely to be a risk. For example if 95% of all pedophiles are heterosexual males you don’t go after and waste your time with women or gay men.
I might also point out that people with HIV have been restricted from travelling to multiple countries for years for a much inferior reason than “national security” and very few people seem to care about their rights.
Nice Article