The immigration officer held out his hand for my passport. He was massive and red-faced, with graying hair and never a lot neck. Behind him lay a crumpled Dunkin’ Donuts bag. He emitted a suburban type of provincialism, and but he sat magisterially in his excessive chair, wielding his stamp like a scepter. At that second, his energy over my destiny was nice sufficient to override even sure constitutional provisos, entitled by the widening exceptionalism of nationwide safety.
Because the officer flipped by way of my passport with squinted eyes, I attempted to imagine an expression of informal innocence, understanding that my complexion and beard merged to kind a blueprint of untrustworthiness.
I used to be 20 years outdated, and I wished to get the efficiency over with—and for it to stay throughout the parameters of theater. Immigration officers world wide wore the armor of aloofness, however solely when reentering the USA would I be made to really feel menacing. Solely at JFK would I be routinely marched off to interrogation rooms, the place I’d await hours extra earlier than being permitted to plead my innocuousness to one of many nation’s gatekeepers.
“Why so many Arab stamps?” he requested.
“Oh, I grew up within the Center East. Numerous regional journey for highschool tournaments, you understand,” I answered, making an attempt the twang of American camaraderie at the same time as he held in his palms the fullest proof of my internationalism.
The officer flipped some extra, shaking his head. “Why would somebody your age journey a lot? To these nations?”
He informed me he wasn’t satisfied I used to be a pupil at Bard Faculty—that he discovered me suspicious. If he had his means, he’d flip me away. He’d ship me again to “my nation.” However, he admitted after clicking away at his laptop, since there have been no crimson flags within the system, he was obligated to let me by way of. As I reached for my passport, he held on to it for a second. “Keep in mind,” he mentioned, trying me within the eyes, “America is watching you.”
4 years later, Edward Snowden would provide documentation that proved the officer’s parting phrases to be completely true. However even on that midwinter morning in 2009, on the eve of President Obama’s first inauguration, touring whereas brown and bearded had long-aroused cartoonish fears of detonation units with crimson and yellow wires wedged deep inside some bodily crevice. To seem like a billion males was to seem like 19 hijackers, not the opposite means round.
Earlier than 9/11, boarding a aircraft was one thing like boarding a practice, with the lone further step of a rickety steel detector designed to intercept hand grenades and AR-15s. Then, in November 2001, George W. Bush signed the Transportation Safety Administration into existence, first as part of the Division of Transportation and later because the journey safety arm of the Division of Homeland Safety. As additional ignitable plots have been uncovered in sneakers, underwear, and extra-large soda bottles, air journey within the 2000s turned prefixed by hour-long shuffles by way of extremely unsexy carceral burlesque reveals. Whilst healthcare was being additional privatized, training additional standardized, and American troopers despatched off to needlessly forfeit lives and limbs, there appeared to be no higher conception of horror for unusual Individuals than one other airborne assault. Our authorities and a phalanx of special-interest teams capitalized on this collective neurosis: the Conflict on Terror unfolded as an age when “safety” reigned as probably the most luxuriant of shibboleths. Uttered by Pentagon officers throughout committee hearings and press conferences, the malleable watchword doubled the protection finances and ultimately justified spending more than $1 trillion on terrorism prevention measures inside the USA.
Amongst such measures was the TSA program “Display Passengers by Remark Methods,” or SPOT, through which officers eyed vacationers for apparently ominous indicators corresponding to yawning, whistling, operating late, showing to not perceive questions, or rubbing their palms collectively. The officers have been granted wide-ranging discretion: Along with going through extemporaneous detentions, unfortunate passengers might be tailed by way of retailers and bogs lengthy after they’d handed by way of safety. On the fore of those pattering palms, roving probes, and suspenseful waits have been vacationers who appeared to have genealogical ties to the Muslim world.
Two years earlier than my journey again to Bard, my father and I flew from the United Arab Emirates to the USA to tour schools for the primary time. When he noticed me on the airport—we’d arrived individually—he raised his eyebrows.
“You didn’t shave?”
“Come on,” I mentioned. “You’ll be able to’t be severe.”
“Properly, when you’re detained, I’m not ready for you at immigration. I’ll come choose you up after you’ve been tortured.”
He was joking, as fathers do, I believed to myself, however just a few hours into our cramped flight I felt my nervousness rise. I requested him once more if he was severe. He jogged my memory what I regarded like: younger and brown-skinned, with facial fluff.
“However I’m not even Muslim,” I mentioned, panicking. “Our final identify is Punjabi!”
My father, all the time clean-shaven, jogged my memory of the Sikhs throughout the US who’d been mistaken for Muslims and threatened, assaulted, and murdered within the months after 9/11. Wanting into my stricken face, he reached upward and pressed the service button. Moments later, he was asking a stewardess for a disposable razor and travel-size tube of shaving cream.
Close to the tip of Obama’s first time period, a Sikh civil rights group launched an app referred to as FlyRights in protest of the disproportionately excessive ranges of secondary safety screenings borne by the turbanned and bearded. The app enabled passengers to file stories of discrimination on to the TSA. In response, the company vowed: “We don’t profile primarily based on race; we don’t profile primarily based on ethnicity; we don’t profile primarily based on faith.” This, it turned out, was a lie. Later that 12 months, The New York Instances revealed an investigation into SPOT through which TSA officers at Boston’s Logan Worldwide Airport anonymously chronicled their fellow officers’ commonly singling out passengers on unsavory grounds. The whistleblowers estimated that minorities accounted for 80 % of vacationers who have been searched throughout sure shifts. “The habits detection program is not a behavior-based program, however it’s a racial profiling program,” one officer informed the Instances. In response to one other: “They only pull apart anybody who they don’t like the best way they appear.”
In 2015, the ACLU successfully sued the TSA for inner information pertaining to SPOT’s scientific credibility. In lieu of sound or coherent methodologies, the ACLU found coaching guides and paperwork that at the least partially defined TSA officers’ untroubled consciences as they pulled ominous-looking Easterners out of line and demanded to know whether or not they beloved or hated America. Whereas SPOT’s official markers weren’t ethnicity-specific, it turned out that the TSA had circulated a good quantity of supplementary materials explicitly delineating the enemy, even because the company retained further documentation conceding that there was little proof such pinpointing was efficient.
One training presentation within the TSA’s possession, although its use stays unclear, was a difficult multiple-choice “Profile Pre-Check” commissioned by the Lengthy Seaside Police Division in 2005. The ostensibly appropriate reply to all 10 questions—e.g., “In 1968, Bobby Kennedy was shot by…” and “Within the Nineteen Eighties, Individuals have been kidnapped in Lebanon by…”—seems to be the identical one: Choice D, “Male Muslim extremist(s) largely between the ages of 17 and 40.” (Because it occurs, Kennedy’s murderer just isn’t and by no means was Muslim.)
After bombing the (largely bearded) Taliban out of Kabul, President Bush routinely hailed the supposedly happier and freer girls of Afghanistan. What he didn’t say is that Muslim girls have been lower than welcome within the US, the place they’d joined Muslim males as a suspect class. In a coaching presentation titled “Femme Fatale: Feminine Suicide Bombers,” authored in 2006 by the TSA, affixed with the seal of the Division of Homeland Safety, and later launched to the general public by the ACLU, one slide encompasses a cartoon of a hijabi mom and daughter arguing over a suicide bomber Barbie doll.
“Mommy! Pleeeez!!” the daughter cries, her eyes bulging. “I want this ‘Suicide Bomber Martyr Barbie’! She’s received ‘Glitter Blast Motion!’”
“Yeesh!” the mom replies, her hand on her brow. “You’ve six already! Reward Allah…”
Broadly talking, solely about half the Islamic insurgents who attacked Western pursuits between 1980 and 2000 wore beards. Nonetheless, by 9/11, the motif was dubitable sufficient that not a single hijacker was absolutely bearded on the time of the assaults. Whereas the Americas have been settled largely by scruffy adventurers within the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the customized of facial hair in American life ebbed and flowed relying on various beliefs of hygiene and non secular conservatism. By the tip of the twentieth century, the state of Massachusetts and even the US Supreme Courtroom had sided with employers that mandated clean-shaven faces within the office. Across the similar time, reactionary political Islam was making newspaper headlines, thanks in no small half to American and British insurance policies that have been ravaging Arab lands.
Rifts between “us” and “them” are finest sown by way of imagery, and the Koranic customized of fist-length beards—a means of honoring Allah’s creations, because the Prophet Muhammad did—was a vivid place to start out. In contrast with the dishevelled, demonstrably unpious Western clothes of the Nineties—replete with pockets chains shackling even skater boys to their capitalist treasure—robes, keffiyehs, and thick beards have been straightforward units with which to different the Arab, who appeared incomprehensible (if not altogether backward) to many Westerners. The divide was vigorously mined by media corporations promoting concern, protection contractors promoting arms, and diabolical statesmen like Dick Cheney for whom the political may solely ever be worthwhile.
As these of us caught within the cultural crosswinds of the 2000s turned much less positive what to do with our beards, the TSA was forthright. A training guide revealed in 2005 warned brokers: “A male with a recent shave and lighter pores and skin on his face could also be a spiritual Muslim zealot who has simply shaved his beard in order to not entice consideration, and to mix in higher with different folks within the neighborhood.” Alas—we have been damned if we shaved, damned if we didn’t.
Once I was in my mid-20s, I flew again to New York one autumn day after a months-long keep in northern India. I’d retreated to a small Himalayan village to write down, learn, and philosophize after masking the 2012 presidential elections as an editor at a nationwide cable information community. Younger, reckless, and uninterested in manufacturing platitudes about freedom and democracy in America, I ran out my financial savings scribbling idealistic tracts at a roughly-hewn desk close to my window and wandering by way of the valley with a stick in hand to thrust back roving leopards. By the tip of this Thus Spoke Zarathustra period, my hair and beard had grown effectively into lush hippie verdure.
Once I arrived at JFK, the immigration officer promptly despatched me to a again room, the place I settled right into a plastic chair and watched as officers loudly requested largely brown vacationers what they’d been doing in Algiers, Almaty, or Karachi, and whether or not they’d had any navy coaching or ties to spiritual organizations. When a trembling detainee couldn’t perceive the questions, the officer would merely repeat them extra loudly, appalled on the incomer’s bumbling grasp of a non-native language.
After an hour, it was my flip. I placed on my strongest American accent and garnished my sentences with massive (however not too massive) phrases—“sabbatical,” “authorship,” “expedition” —to indicate my emancipation from the moil of rebel machinations. I effeminized my voice in addition, answering the officer’s questions with a skinny, cantillating lightness. (Regardless of the prospect of a flamable phallus lodged deep up some bodily crevice, it appeared there couldn’t probably be a homosexual terrorist.) Smiling, he informed me I regarded like Jesus and despatched me on my means.
If these tête-à-têtes with airport officers felt like performances, it’s as a result of they have been spotlit, sundered from unusual life, from sincerity: Certainly there’s a couple of solution to be American, to exist inside a nation, and when left to my very own units—my associates, my brightly painted Harlem house, my ideas—I may select a means that appeared honorable, or at the least clear-minded. I may overtly distinguish between the denizen and the oligarch, between cooperative civics and self-defeating jingoism, between folks bombed into desperation and a navy beholden to its bombmakers. However throughout exams of political loyalty, these oldest vignettes within the guide, at the least one occasion would all the time be consciously playacting.
Nose to nose with an officer, I had no alternative however to undergo his binary considering. I couldn’t complicate his premises by telling him I feared that declarations of allegiance solely solicited abetments of violence. Or that terrorism was the perennial recourse of individuals terrorized by establishments. My finest guess might need been to put out our deadlock in sensible, capitalistic phrases: “Positive,” I’d say, “these bewhiskered zealots are pesky as hell, however your techniques don’t work.” As proof, I may hand him the leaked DHS memo from 2016 disclosing that the TSA failed to intercept weapons and different contraband in 95 % of take a look at circumstances. Or I may dig up the TSA’s personal knowledge indicating that the bulk of firearms intercepted at US airport checkpoints belong to vacationers passing by way of the American South, the place gun homeowners are much more likely to be white than Asian. If I have been prepared to danger a visit to a US naval base in Cuba, I’d even level to the truth that Individuals after 2001 have been extra more likely to be killed by falling televisions or by children accidentally wielding guns than by terrorism—and that the vast majority of terrorist assaults on this nation have been dedicated by non-Muslims anyway.
Since 9/11, roughly 150 Individuals have been killed in Muslim-linked terrorist assaults throughout the US. In the identical timeframe, a whole bunch of hundreds of Individuals have been murdered by home gun violence, taken their very own lives, overdosed on opioids, or died as a result of medical insurance corporations turned a chilly shoulder. Contemplating this, the TSA’s luxurious spending of taxpayer {dollars} begins to look fairly a bit just like the credo of the military-industrial complex as an entire: win much less, spend extra, and pray day by day for a spasmodic incident that retains sending oxygen to these shibboleths on life help.
The 13,000 paperwork made public by the ACLU in 2017 revealed that the TSA carried out its personal inner investigation after the Instances’ report on Logan Airport. The company discovered that there had certainly been some feverishly chauvinistic practices at airports in Newark, Miami, Chicago, and Honolulu. One habits detection officer, as an example, submitted an nameless criticism about his supervisor referring to turbaned passengers as “towel heads.” The DHS subsequently decreed a collection of reforms, considered one of which directed TSA workers to not preoccupy themselves too fanatically with specters of Islamic terrorists. “Coaching paperwork will state the anti-discrimination level clearly,” a memo read, “and can reveal its significance by avoiding the at present unique concentrate on examples on Arab/Muslim terrorists.” Quickly, references to Muslim zealots, Islamic extremists, and suicide bomber Barbie dolls disappeared from the TSA’s literature. SPOT was renamed the “Habits Detection Visible Search Activity Evaluation Undertaking,” presumably in hopes {that a} sheer preponderance of consonants would possibly preempt any villainizing acronyms.
However, almost 25 years after the assaults that formalized the stereotype, I nonetheless discover myself having to step apart for additional prodding each time I fly with a beard. At smaller airports, this typically means standing with my legs unfold aside as I’m frisked in full view of framed “Keep in mind 9/11” posters and aged {couples} who avert their eyes as they move by, much less embarrassed on my behalf than recoiling from the alien of their midst.
Final summer season, on my solution to New York from Toronto, I used to be stopped for what the safety officer informed me was a random examine. Across the similar time within the US, nameless authorities henchmen have been selecting school college students with Muslim-sounding names off the streets as a result of they’d protested Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
“Are you positive it’s random?” I requested, emboldened by Canada’s much less formidable aura of nationwide safety.
Abashed, the officer insisted his checks have been completely indiscriminate, and as I proceeded to the X-ray machines, I noticed him summon a white man in his 50s behind me.
For the reason that TSA doesn’t formally acquire knowledge on the ethnicity of passengers it pulls apart, anecdotal proof is all we have now to go by. Various South Asian and Arab males in New York Metropolis whom I spoke to over the previous few months informed me tales about how they nonetheless compulsively shave earlier than flights and present as much as airports with hours to spare. Certainly one of them, whose Muslim identify is about as frequent as “Richard Johnson,” was flagged within the DHS’s system within the early 2000s as a result of he shared his identify with an alleged terrorist, leading to further stops, delays, and interrogations for the following decade. In my conversations, I got here to comprehend that almost all of us had been strip-searched at the least as soon as and focused at the same time as scarcely stubbled youngsters.
Today, TSA brokers are politer than they have been through the Conflict on Terror period. They conduct additional checks virtually apologetically, as if tacitly acknowledging their parodic shortcuts to preempting “threats.” In the meantime, the symbolism of being brown and bearded has grown risibly paradoxical. To be Indian in America right now, as I’m, is to be extra built-in (and thus much less unique) than ever earlier than. Politically talking, Indian Individuals populate the security-loving proper much more than they do the left: FBI Director Kash Patel, second woman Usha Vance, former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, 2024 GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, and former Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal all are ethnically Indian. On the left, after all, is Zohran Mamdani, the brown, bearded, Muslim mayor-elect of the exact same metropolis that popularized Islamophobic profiling when Mamdani was in elementary college.
This has made for an odd state of affairs, through which the folks whom safety officers proceed to seek out outwardly menacing look precisely like among the folks main our metropolis, state, and federal governments. Put one other means: At present, the bearded brown man can signify a Wahabist simply as simply as he might be the director of the FBI or the mayor of the biggest metropolis in America.
Mamdani will be the primary bearded mayor of New York Metropolis since 1913, as The New York Instances, months late to the bandwagon, famous in its post-election media blitz. This furry probability was not misplaced on his opponents. When Mamdani was a candidate in New York Metropolis’s Democratic mayoral major, a pro-Cuomo tremendous PAC drafted a mailer that shortly caught the eye of each campaigns. This wasn’t as a result of the flyer charged that Mamdani “rejects Israel” and “rejects Jewish rights,” calumnies that by then have been hackneyed and predictable. Fairly, it was as a result of it featured a doctored {photograph} through which his beard was made to look darker, longer, and extra… Islamic. One other pro-Cuomo tremendous PAC, this one funded partially by Mike Bloomberg, launched an attack ad days earlier than the overall election that pictured Mamdani in entrance of the burning Twin Towers. In such moments, Islamophobia’s suffix—“phobia”—utilized extra actually than ever to the transmogrification of a broad, eclectic swath of humanity right into a singularly scary risk.
On October 24, the soon-to-be-mayor lastly broke. Standing outdoors the Bronx’s Islamic Cultural Heart, he immediately addressed the benefit with which the ascription of Islam persists as a casually wielded derogation within the US, dwelling to five million Muslims. A lot of them bear in mind the years when Obama was derided as “Muslim,” his uncommon identify seized upon by exponents of an enduringly Anglo-Saxon America. The declare was false, but it surely was one other means of claiming he was inherently unqualified to be president. “Rising up within the shadow of 9/11, I’ve identified what it means to stay with an undercurrent of suspicion on this metropolis,” Mamdani said that day. “I’ll all the time bear in mind the disdain that I confronted, the best way my identify may instantly develop into ‘Mohammad,’ and the way I may return to my metropolis solely to be requested in a double-mirrored room on the airport if I had any plan on attacking it.”
For his personal unwavering objections to Israel’s vicious marketing campaign of slaughter and displacement, Mamdani was called “a full-blown jihadist” by Elise Stefanik, the screechy congresswoman identified for doing all in her energy to insulate Israel from criticism. Consultant Laura Gillen wrote: “Professional-Hamas Zohran is unfit to carry any workplace in the USA.” On a radio present, Senator Kristen Gillibrand admonished Mamdani’s (fictitious) “references to world jihad.” And President Trump, reliably, went straight for Mamdani’s passport: “Lots of people are saying he’s right here illegally,” he told reporters in July.
Sadly for the nativists, restoring the US to a purist paradise of navy interventionism would require additionally deporting the six in 10 Individuals now against Israel’s authorities. At this second, there are too many Individuals who’re skeptical of Orientalist caricatures, too many Individuals who seem like Mamdani and like me, for Islamophobia to maintain pretexts of nationwide safety.
In January, the younger man as soon as interrogated, as I used to be, by authorities officers who noticed him as a risk to his metropolis—a person who in school referred to his beard as “a symbolic center finger to the typically spoken, however oft-accepted, stereotype that pervades America: ‘brown with a beard? Terrorist!’”—might be sworn in as his metropolis’s highest-ranking elected official. Not solely has the solar set on the century of King C. Gillette’s security razor—the as soon as barefaced American psychos of Wall Avenue having yielded to beards within the Eisenhower Government Workplace Constructing—however the very faces of us and them have grown nearer in semblance. And because it’s tougher than ever to style convincing, trillion-dollar antagonists out of turbans, veils, beards, and frankincense, maybe it’s time for TSA officers to halt, probe, and grill different, realer enemies: the airline executives who constrict our seats, the protection contractors who plunder our taxes, and the xenophobic public officers who vilify swaths of the proletariat at the same time as tech and finance moguls mangle our economic system to demise.
Whereas I’m nonetheless intimately conversant in the feeling of a safety wand caressing my internal thighs, I haven’t been despatched to a again room for questioning since 2019, once I turned a naturalized American citizen—a contented resolution that in no small half hinged upon absolutely the freedom to assume and write in public. But, having written this essay, I discover myself questioning what that immigration officer with the Dunkin’ Donuts bag would possibly discover on his laptop if I have been standing earlier than his sales space right now, now very a lot in “my nation.” Would my public confessions of doubt foredoom any charades of chauvinism? Would the officer’s monochromatic exams of loyalty collapse underneath the contradictory weight of 1 free act ridiculing the very equipment meant to guard it? Or wouldn’t it all anyhow come again to my face, to these coarse, black bristles, older than Jesus, propagating my cinnamon pores and skin, the abiding insignia of the alien in a nation clinging to its stale, dissonant shibboleths?
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