Perils of flying while brown

Salon has a beautifully written article on the Perils of flying while brown. I have nothing much to add except that I too was a victim to this widespread phenomenon. 

It is all Mitchell Johnson's fault. It so happened that Mitch had a glorious summer with the ball and wiped the floor with the Poms. His mutton chops were credited for his Ashes glory and I in a MoM1 decided that I would grow one as well. And it just happened to be that I got my new passport in that period and the photo on my passport has me sporting a menacing looking "Mitch Mo". The Mo that terrorised the English (and later the Saffers) made me a terrorist suspect. Quelle horreur.

I have travelled widely and no one has made airtravel more painful than the US. Despite being a brown man (clean shaven brown man if I may add), I have an Australian passport. But that counts for little for the TSA. Also to note, I am not Muslim. I still got pulled aside for multiple checks; twice in Sydney and again when I landed in LA. Random, they called it but the odds of me getting the number three times in a row is as remote as a treeful of Monkeys with the finished version of Hamlet that they have typed out one key at a time. 

As courteous as the TSA agents were to me, and they were really friendly, way beyond the call of duty, chatting to me about wine in Napa valley when I spoke of my time in Bordeaux, talking about the differences between NYC and LA (side note: LA, apparently rocks), etc. I simply cannot accept the "better safe than sorry" excuse that is often touted to support this profiling. I travelled to London not that long before and I wasn't frisked and prodded to get into the country. Long live the Queen. The US as a nation is like a paranoid schizophrenic; seeing enemies everywhere and danger in everything. I have much to say about their foreign policies and the Military Industrial Complex but suffice to say that other countries that have been victims of terrorist attacks too, as London has been and Madrid and Mumbai, and those cities and those nations do not possess the same amount of crazy. 

It is not about the inconvenience of a five minute delay but the humiliation of being a suspect for nothing more than the amount of melanin in my skin. The "Othering". The making you fear for your safety. The silencing in the name of freedom. (I almost didn't write this a month after my trip to US, coz the NSA may be (definitely) reading it). 

Anywayz, read the article from Salon. And NSA, please please don't spy on me. I am just a geek who once had a mutton chop tache.

1  Moment of Madness