Date: Jan 22, 2012
Time: Around 7:00 A.M.
I was sitting near the check-in counter of Southwest Airlines at Los Angeles International Airport with another Indian friend who had come to drop me off. I was leaving LA to start a new job in another city, and considering that my friend and I had reached the airport ahead of time, we decided to hang out for a bit before I proceeded towards security check. Now, two brown guys in their twenties, casually chatting away at one of U.S.’s busiest airports and not showing any inclination and/or urgency to catch a plane, what could possibly go wrong? As I was to discover a short while later, plenty!
While talking to my friend, I happened to noticed two Transportation Security Administration (TSA) officers staring at us from the floor above. I didn’t pay much attention to them at the time. Five minutes later, one of those officers approached us:
Officer: “So what are you guys doing here this morning?”
Me: “Well, I’m moving to another city to start a new job, and my friend here has come to drop me off.”
Officer: “Are you waiting on more people to join you?”
Me (confused): “No, we reached the airport early and are just killing time.”
Officer: “By the way, there’s a Starbucks right outside the airport if you guys want to grab coffee.”
Me: “No, I’m not really in the mood for….”
My friend (interrupting me): “Yeah, coffee would be good!”
We exited the building. Fifteen minutes later, I re-entered the airport and while going through security, was asked to step aside for additional screening. I saw the same officer who my friend and I had spoken to earlier picking up the trays my belongings were in and motioning me towards the side. I was given a full pat down by his colleague and asked various questions with regard to my presence in the country, specifically the purpose of my travel, how long I’d been in the country for, so on and so forth. The exchange was cordial and I was able to board the plane on time.
Even though nothing untoward happened, the fact that it did happen was unsettling to say the least for many reasons: fear of the unknown – after all, it was my first such experience, the possibility of missing my flight and the unsavory experiences of people with the law enforcement in the U.S. that I’d read about was all I could think at the time.
Now, there were two ways in which I could have reacted to this incident:
- cry victim by blaming the United States for being a racist country, conveniently ignoring the fact that I could have as easily been harassed in my own country (India) on the basis of my physical attributes and my mother tongue. ‘Indian‘, after all, is not a race but a nationality, just like ‘American‘ is, and my countrymen vary in skin tones and other physical attributes like height, etc. depending on the part of the country they hail from.
- Ponder over the reasons as to why it happened.
Given that I’m not much of a self-loathing ‘why me’/’what did I do wrong’/’where is God’ kind, I chose the latter i.e. pondering over the reasons as to why it happened, and will be expanding on these reasons in the next few sections.
Analyzing Genesis of Fear
When people react with caution towards someone based on their physical attributes like skin color and/or their religious beliefs, the reason is (mostly) rooted in some unpleasant occurrence(s) of the past, which forms the basis of such stereotypical notions. For a 6’2″, light skinned male like myself, Osama Bin Laden and his ilk messed it up for people like me who I have nothing in common with apart from my skin color, be it in terms of the languages that I speak, the faith that I follow or even the part of the world that I come from. In other words, a terrorist will look like me, and given the increase in the number of terror attacks this past year, it won’t be prudent on my part to blame the personnel responsible for securing a high risk zone like an airport to act with caution when they see someone like me. I am collateral damage in the fight against terror on account of my brown privilege, just like millions of non-radicalized Muslims are by virtue of their faith, and this understanding is crucial because then the steps like extreme vetting taken by any government in order to safeguard its borders come across as pragmatic rather than offensive, no matter how aggravating or humiliating the experience is for the person at its receiving end.
Some Stereotypes Are Legit
Another point to understand here is that we all harbor stereotypical notions, something that I’ll explain with specific examples shortly, and the reason why this realization is important is rooted in simple psychology: we typically don’t judge ourselves as harshly for our behavior towards others as we judge those who subject us to the same behavior. However, once this anomaly in our conduct is pointed out to, we might become more accepting of the situation and tolerant to the behavior of others towards us. After all, it might get slightly difficult to ridicule someone for how they act when we know we would have behaved the same way under similar circumstances, no? Now, what I just described is the very definition of hypocrisy, or in this case, our inadvertent hypocrisy. At times, we get so carried away by our self-righteousness and self-congratulatory magnanimity that we lose track of reality and our ability to reason logically.
For instance, when I was studying in Los Angeles, the crime rate in areas around my university was very high, so high that we received one crime alert per day on an average from the university’s police department. Most of the suspects mentioned in this alert were either Black or Hispanic, and these were the kinds I was concerned about running into while walking home alone from the university in the wee hours. Should I have dismissed my fear as being irrational, patting myself on the back for my liberal views like ‘crime/criminal is not related to any specific racial group as there is a monster in all of us’, or was there a reasonable explanation to it? There was one, and it was based on who was responsible for committing the majority of the crimes in that area.
Similarly, I have been cautioned by some of my friends against visiting states like Alabama in the south. For the uninitiated, Alabama lies in what is colloquially called the Bible Belt and is full of ultra conservative white Christians. I’ve been given an impression that people of color are not safe in that part of the country. Now, if I were to indeed visit Alabama, I’d be concerned at the sight of a white person with a gun, more so now in the light of this recent incident. Again, the basis of my concern would be what I’ve heard about the place and its grim history of violence against the non-whites.
As for another and final example, it took the police longer than usual to nab the Baton Rough Serial Killer because he was black and the police was looking for a white person, basing their assumption on the fact that the majority of the serial killers in the past had mostly been white.
Therefore, such phobias are purely contextual and/or place dependent and as stated before, exist because of some unfortunate episode of the past. Sadly enough, when it comes to Islamic terror, the perpetrator in most of the cases will be a well built light skinned male like myself, and I’ll be the Black/Hispanic of LA or the white of Alabama for others at a place like an airport.
The Politics of it All
Now that we’ve analyzed the reasons behind why people harbor phobias, we’ll go over some of the false narratives presented as facts by the right, followed by the left’s over zealous reaction and subsequent arguments presented against the ban. Towards the end, we’ll analyze the fallacies of the ban itself.
Right’s Alternative Facts
One of the areas where the Trump administration is definitely winning, and winning bigly is in presenting alternative facts. Here are a few:
‘It’s a continuation of Obama’s Policy’
Utter nonsense! The bill that Obama signed into law in 2015 changed the rules for citizens of those 38 countries who were eligible to enter the United States without a visa and stay there for a period of 90 days. According to Obama’s policy, if anyone from these 38 countries traveled to any of the 7 countries namely Iraq, Syria, Iran, Yemen, Somalia, Sudan and Libya, they would no longer be eligible for a visa waiver while entering the U.S. i.e. they’d have to apply for one in order to enter the country. More importantly, none of the citizens of the aforementioned 7 countries were ever banned from entering the U.S., who Trump later banned and falsely cited Obama’s order as being the basis of his decision.
‘Obama banned Iraqis for 6 months too’
Obama only banned those Iraqis for a period of 6 months who were seeking refuge in the United States after two Iraqi nationals, who had entered the country as refugees and living in Bowling Green, Ky, were caught while attempting to send money and weapons to some Al-Qaeda operatives. Moreover, this policy was never made public, unlike Trump who announced his with a big bang.
Read the complete article here.
Left’s More Whinning
Now let’s see how things have been on the left side of the divide and go over some of their arguments and other facts.
‘But Guns Kill More People than terrorists’
According to liberals, gun control should be prioritized over tackling terrorism due to the higher number of deaths caused by gun violence. Two questions here:
- Should drafting safety regulations for airplanes be ignored just because more people die in car accidents than they do in plane crashes? Or does “I am out of oranges so I’m going to buy some apples” make any sense considering that the two are not related other than the fact that both are fruits? Similarly, are gun violence and terrorism related, except that they both kill people? Then why compare the two?
- Is there any proof that that the government is unable to come up with a legislation on gun control because it’s busy dealing in tackling terrorism? Alternatively, will the time saved by not tackling terrorism necessarily go into enacting stricter gun control laws? Then why waste time in suggesting what the government should do first? Is it really pragmatic to expect a Republican regime to upset the National Rifle Association?
Point is, progress has to be made on both gun control and terrorism. One does not preclude the other. Also, expecting the Republicans to enact stricter gun control laws is futile, and the left must choose their battles wisely in the interest of time and energy that is spent on such efforts.
What about Israel?
Now, how many of us are aware that 16 Muslim majority countries namely Algeria, Bangladesh, Brunei, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Malaysia, Oman, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria, United Arab Emirates and Yemen forbid the admission of Israeli passport holders into their countries. 8 of these 16 countries, namely Iran, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen won’t even allow a non-Israeli like myself to enter their country if I have an used or an unused Israeli visa stamped on my passport. I’ll have to get a new passport in order to enter these 8 countries. The surprising part is the extent to which these Muslim countries were outraged, conveniently ignoring their own history of intolerance.
Also, though I sincerely appreciate the left protesting this ban and lawyers setting up make shift offices at airports to help immigrants in need, I think it’s important to understand here is that no body is clean and the countries affected by the ban have done the same to Israel, a fact that might help calm down some nerves. Offering a counter argument to what I just said by stating that banning Israelis is not leading to any refugees in need being left out in a lurch would take this discussion towards Europe’s own not so pleasant experience with refugees, one such example being the drastic change in the German society that went on from being accepting of public nudity movements like Freikörperkultur to introducing trains with female only compartments due to increased attacks on women by migrants. Even though my heart goes out to the little kids and others suffering in the war zone, the havoc some of them have caused in Europe is hard to ignore.
Why the ban Won’t Work
Even though one can understand the rationale behind extreme vetting of immigrants into the U.S. as explained previously, the current proposal itself is riddled with loopholes and will not serve its intended purpose because:
- None of the citizens from the countries included in the travel ban have ever been directly responsible for any American death.
- The countries that are actually known to foment terror like Saudi Arabia and Pakistan were left out of the ban.
- The U.S. has one of the best and the most extensive intelligence gathering apparatus in the world, and given its involvement in world affairs, especially in the countries covered by the ban, isn’t it shocking to hear the current dispensation working under the garb of “total and complete shutdown of the entry of Muslims to the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on” as per one of Trump’s pre-election speeches? Question here is: what will a 120 day ban achieve? What will the U.S. intelligence agencies gather in four months that they haven’t gathered in all these years? Were these agencies even kept in the loop while proposing this ban?
- According to a recent report, the FBI claimed that most of the Muslims were radicalized after they entered the United States, not before. If this is indeed true, then how would such a ban ever be effective?
So Why Announce the Ban in the first place?
To answer this question, we’ll have to analyze Trump’s personality here, in brief for now because a full analysis will have enough text to warrant a separate article on the topic.
Trump loves to be in the limelight and wants people to be in awe of him, be fearful of him. His excessive use of ‘I’ in his speeches, or even his body language during his swearing in ceremony (see here) are all testament to this fact. Though there’s nothing wrong with it, one of the drawbacks of such a personality is that it can lead to a person making rash decisions in order to garner quick accolades, and the Muslim ban seems to be a direct outcome of such a thought process. Trump promised his supporters that he’d bring in such a ban once he’s elected President. The ban, as we now know, is hogwash and is not intended to stop terror attacks on U.S. soil but to appease a largely jingoism-thirsty audience.
Conclusion
It’s easy to get offended when one is singled out because of their skin color and/or religious affiliation. Getting offended by such diktats cannot be the way forward. When we go grocery shopping, don’t we ‘vet’ all the tomatoes to differentiate the good ones from the not-so good ones? So if it helps in catching a potential terrorist, let’s have an open mind about getting frisked more frequently than others by people responsible for our security. After all, the onus of ensuring our safety is not only on the law enforcement officers but also on us. We should be cooperating with them in order to make their job easier.
Having said that, I hope the law enforcement holds their end of the bargain and do not subject the public to unnecessary harassment. Moreover, as supportive as one can get of the government’s measures to tackle terrorism, the measures themselves must be tangible and having a potential to deliver. If their intent is just to massage the President’s ego or serve as a means to garner cheap publicity that results in nothing but nuisance for a section of people, the government cannot expect people to take it lying down. Voices will be raised, protests will ensue and nobody will win here. If Trump truly wants ‘winning’, then he has to at least attempt to spread the joy, or at least the illusion of it to a much larger audience.
