Flying during the holidays has always been a trial: lost baggage, long delays, expensive tickets and crowded airplanes. This year brought on the new obstacle of mile-long security lines. My family and I, leaving for vacation shortly before Christmas, waited nearly an hour to go through Newark airport security. When we finally reached the checkpoint, we were ushered through with an ease that made me wonder just how much safety new security measures are adding. Behind us, however, a middle-aged Indian man was having more trouble making his plane. He was not outwardly suspicious. The only visible difference between him and my father was that my father's skin is white and the stranger's was brown. And yet, security guards separated him out of the line, combing through the contents of his bags and patting him down for weapons. The man, of course, had nothing. Our president and congressmen have been talking a lot about airline security lately, but behind the scenes many have been doing all they can to prevent full federalization or to send military men with guns to our airports — instead of sending the funds for new baggage x-rays and better trained security agents. Still, they have not hesitated to implement a system of racial profiling that, while designed to keep us safe, is really a threat to American society.
Those who advocate racial profiling tell us that it is a necessary tool to ensure America's safety. They say those most likely to blow up a building or bring a bomb on an airplane are of Arab descent. They say that brown skin is enough to arouse suspicion. One wonders how George W. Bush, widely praised for visiting a mosque just after Sept. 11, can advocate tolerance and profiling in the same breath. He tells the people of this country not to make judgments based on skin color or religion while members of his government are directed to do just the opposite.
By allowing racial profiling, our president and his colleagues in congress are permitting a culture of fear and hate to envelop the United States. They are saying it is all right to look at your neighbor, who may be from a different part of the world than you, and wonder if he will be the next terrorist appearing on the evening news. They are saying it is all right for Arab Americans to be detained without cause, their constitutional rights suddenly a memory. They are saying it is all right for an Indian man to be pulled out of a crowd of travelers simply because his skin is dark. We Americans, as is often the case, know better than our leaders. Racial profiling is not all right.
This country is built on the concept of diversity. I am the descendant of immigrants as much as my friend whose parents were born in Iran and Pakistan. We are both Americans. Part of what terrorists hate about this country, we are told, is its opportunity, the fact that women and men of all ethnic and religious backgrounds can start a business or own a home or send their children to school. By destroying the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, terrorists knocked down some of this country's physical foundation. But what our nation is truly built on are these ideals, this vague notion of opportunity for all which we can see in real time in classrooms and on Main Streets. If we let the threat of violence frighten us into abandoning these principles, saying that the color of your skin or the place of your birth makes you a suspect, makes you not equal to but less than your countrymen, we let the terrorists win. We cannot allow our desire for security to unweave the very fabric of this nation.
My travels were fairly uneventful after making it through security. The plane was crowded, the movie was bad and our bags arrived a day after we did. Still, that image of a man singled out because of his skin color continued to haunt me. Because of Sept. 11, many Americans are afraid, not just of flying but of living. Yet we cannot let our fear blind us to the government-sponsored discrimination going on before our very eyes. We should all be haunted by those men and women who have been detained without reason or frisked without cause in the name of safety. We should remember that we are Americans, and we are better than this. Katherine Reilly is from Short Hills, N.J. She can be reached at kcreilly@princeton.edu.
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