"Flying while brown" has been a depressingly well-documented phenomenon, with perhaps the scariest recent example being the Canadian Muslim doctor
expelled from a United Airlines flight after a "drunk and belligerent" passenger decided he was a terrorist because he was praying. But to me,
this just takes the cake -- apparently even Arabic script
with English translation is enough to bar you.
NEW YORK - An Arab human rights activist was prevented from boarding a plane at Kennedy Airport while wearing a T-shirt that read, "We will not be silent," in English and Arabic.
Raed Jarrar was at the gate to board a JetBlue Airways flight to Oakland, Calif., on Aug. 12 when four officials from the airline or a government agency stopped him and told him he could not board with the shirt on, he said Wednesday.
One official told him, "Going to an airport with a T-shirt in Arabic script is like going to a bank and wearing a T-shirt that says, `I'm a robber,"' he said.
After a long discussion about what he could and couldn't wear, the authorities finally made him cover up the eeeeevil terrorist Arabic letters. But then they made this charming decision:
Jarrar said he was forced to give up his seat near the front of the plane and was issued a new boarding pass for a seat in the rear.
It's like it's a schoolbus or something!
Note that they did NOT detain Jarrar. They did not strip-search him. At no point was he under any serious suspicion of actually committing a terrorist act. The "terrorism" involved here lies solely in the fact that he was wearing a shirt with Arabic script on it.
A whole language has been indicted as tantamount to terrorism. This is clear, simple racial profiling. But there's a bigger, subtextual issue here that bothers me. The attitude expressed above is merely a reflection of a common idea here in the US -- the government reserves the right to hassle you based on your race ANYWAY, but you should actually expect to get hassled if you bring attention to your race. I suspect other racial groups have felt something similar (e.g.: cops more likely to pull over the Latino playing music in Spanish or to be harder on a suspect with more "ebonic"-style speaking patterns). To me it just brings home the arbitrary nature of this type of "policing". It's based on nothing but stereotypes. It is, in fact, nothing more than a particularly disturbing form of the "security theater" that's used to distract us at airports -- call it "security minstrel show".
As with most cases of racist incidents, there are two elements in play here. First is the undeniable racism of the individual agent himself. However, that's not NECESSARILY an indictment of JetBlue -- there's always the possibility that this was just an example of an individual acting on his own based on stupid stereotypes. If the organization responds with an apology and real action, it would be safe to assume the actions of this individual did not reflect the organization as a whole. So what did JetBlue do?
Jenny Dervin, a JetBlue spokeswoman, acknowledged the dispute and said the airline was investigating. She noted the incident came two days after British authorities announced they had foiled a plot to blow up jetliners over the Atlantic.
That's not an apology, it's an excuse. The fact that Pakistanis (who speak fucking Urdu, anyway) were caught in London does not automatically make Arabic script a sign of terrorism. I've lost a lot of respect for JetBlue today.