Flying While PAKISTAN (Part 3)

Parts 1 and 2 in this continuing series can be found here and here.

One of the more disturbing photos to emerge from the recent arrest and detention of 14-year-old Ahmed Mohamed was the image of an African-American police officer standing behind and observing the detained and handcuffed Ahmed.  This situation and numerous instances of police responses to civil discord in the United States—I have found this particular video coming from the Los Angeles Police Department’s recent murder of a mentally ill man particularly suggestive if also quite disturbing—suggest that the solution to police abuse of civilians in the U.S. is not simply one of prioritizing the hiring and advancement of minority police officers in municipal police departments.  Black and brown police officers are a part of the state’s repertoire of violence against racial minorities in the contemporary United States.

Indeed, the disease of White Supremacy has manifested in symptomology far more complex than the analytic of ‘white-on-black violence’ suggests.  Put succinctly, black people can be racist against other black people, the same with respect to intra-brown conflict, and white people themselves commonly use White Supremacy to police other white people.  We know this about white people in a very fundamental way—hence, common terms like ‘white trash’—but also in white liberals’ discomfort with white advocates for social and racial justice.  More broadly, we also know quite a bit about intra-group policing in other domains:  for example, gays enacting homophobia against each other—the movement for gay marriage was emblematic of this—and women being misogynistic against each other.

So when I was sent to my (second) Secondary Review in San Francisco’s airport last December—all for the crime of doing research and teaching in Pakistan (and loving it)—my momentary relief that the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agent assigned to interview me was Asian-American was, in retrospect, naïve.  Generally speaking, when planning my return itinerary, I was hoping that flying through San Francisco’s airport would offer up a higher caliber of CBP officer than the yahoos I had experienced when traveling internationally through airports like Detroit Metropolitan (but more on that later). 

Things looked to be proceeding well, then, as I walked into the Colored Waiting Room of SFO international arrivals.  As my internal dialogue had it:  “This Asian-American officer would know something non-sensational about South Asia, right?  He would have had his own experiences of racism and not re-enact them against other Asians (ascribed or otherwise), correct?  He would, at the very least, not bark at clearly tired people coming from a place he can understand to be very, very far away, no?”

The answer to that latter question was, in fact, ‘No.’  I myself was treated relatively deferentially by this CBP guy, although also given a healthy reminder the pervasiveness of homophobia in our present context—San Francisco included.  So, my 15 minute questioning went something like this:

CBP:  You’ve been gone a long time?

Me:  Yes.  12 months.

CBP:  Where? 

Me:  Pakistan, most recently, but also many other places.

CBP:  What do you do for a living?  What were you doing in Pakistan?

Me:  I’m a law professor.  I was law professing in Pakistan; here’s my university ID and my letter of invitation to Pakistan.

CBP:  You were also in Europe?

Me:  Yes, for the first half of 2014.

CBP:  All alone?

Me:  Ummm… sorta.  I was in Germany; my boyfriend was in Finland.

CBP:  What were you doing in Germany?

Me:  I was in residence at a research center.

CBP:  And so, you and the missus made a European adventure of it all?

Me:  Umm… I was working.  So was he.

CBP:  So, did you and her go together to Pakistan?

Me (Internal Dialogue):  [Federal Rule of Civil Procedure Rule 8(b)(3) declares:  “General and Specific Denials. A party that intends in good faith to deny all the allegations of a pleading—including the jurisdictional grounds—may do so by a general denial. A party that does not intend to deny all the allegations must either specifically deny designated allegations or generally deny all except those specifically admitted.”  What should I say?]

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But as soon as my questioning was ending, a group of different South Asian travelers—some of whom I had been corralled off with in Abu Dhabi at our/mine first Secondary Review screening on this long journey—entered the SFO Colored Waiting Room.  One of these travelers approached the long counter where I was standing to inquire about procedure.  But, apparently,

“YOU DO NOT DO THAT!”

Apparently, hell hath no fury like an Asian-American CBP officer confronted with South Asian travelers.  I jumped inside as the officer yelled loudly at these travelers to sit down and to wait for being called and questioned.  While I had been feeling relatively somnambulant in the dull glow of this CBP officer’s (c)overt homophobia—nothing like coming home, no?—I suddenly felt awake and enraged by this officer’s overt racism.  I wanted to apologize to my fellow musaafiren, but I myself was being victimized by this government—mine own—so I didn’t know if the transitive properties of apologizing would even work in this situation.

Ultimately, I did something I felt dishonorable about and left these Pakistanis and Indians to fend for themselves in bureaucratic America.  While I’m not proud of having left my fellow travelers to the capriciousness of racist American Secondary Review officers, I believed that leaving Secondary Review intact was a necessary act of self-preservation because (as I had experienced before) the bigger ordeal in entering the U.S. having visited Pakistan was baggage inspection.  And I had to save my energy for that.  

The first step in the baggage inspection stage of arriving in the U.S. having visited Pakistan is, unsurprisingly, gathering one’s luggage from the international arrivals luggage carousel.  The peculiarity of this step of travel is that it often occurs under the glare and noses of German Shepards.  To be sure, I personally feel demeaned by the use of dogs against myself in this context—if you want to search my junk, use your bare human hands and own your perversity—while also feeling that the dogs themselves are being misused as sentient beings.  But I can’t even imagine how my unease with this peculiarly American effort at intimidation of travelers—replicated in contexts as bizarre as the Atlanta airport’s domestic terminals’ security waiting lines, and Abu Ghraib—is felt x100 by many African-Americans who have witnessed the state’s utilization of dogs against African-American political mobilization, and also the many Muslims who consider dogs (for good reason) unclean.  In short, the CBP’s use of dogs to inspect travelers is a travesty on innumerable fronts.

To be continued.  Comments will be moderated.

Comments

[confused by your post]

There is a lot going on in this post Professor Redding. It is interesting to see how your life is impacted by the interplay between security and oppression that goes on in every international airport now. From you description it appears the US could lighten up on the oppression side and still achieve the same security results. No German Shepherds in public view. No impolite CBP agents. These items would seem to be modest but concrete improvements that should be made to US travel security.

I like reading about your personal experiences and thoughts on racial profiling and racism here as well. Keep it up.

In the interest of furthering a healthy discussion here related to your post I would like to share a few.

Racial profiling for security purposes in the context of international travel is very widely practiced all over the world. I believe it is a useful tool in maintain maintaining security. Do not read this as a blanket endorsement of all racial profiling in the international travel context as practiced by the US. It is not. The question is how much "oppression" in the form of racial profiling should be allowed in such travel context. The question does assume racial profiling yields a security benefit. Some would answer the question with "none" for various reasons such as:

racial profiling international travelers

(a) does not really aid security,
(b) is morally wrong,
(c) violates various laws, or
(d) creates real animosity in those profiled and sometimes also in other governments.

Others would answer that question with "a lot" because they disagree with (a)-(d) above. Many are pragmatic and believe what is OK regarding international travel profiling varies with the level of threat to security.

You've been kind enough to share some anecdotes touching on the topic so it would be interesting to hear some of your thoughts on racial profiling in international travel.

[Doug Richmond]

No CBP officer should be unnecessarily rude to anyone, and all of us who travel regularly find much to dislike about related security issues, but I am otherwise puzzled by this post. How is the use of dogs that are able to sniff out explosives and drugs in the fashion you describe offensive? Did you really think you could go to Pakistan (or Syria, or Afghanistan or any other country raising legitimate terrorism concerns) and not be questioned about the purpose of your travels? Heck, I get questioned about the purpose of my visits by border security officers at every country I visit. And was the CBP officer a homophobe or simply disconcertingly inattentive? Regardless, your claim that you were being "victimized" by your government is more than a stretch.

[Jeff Redding]

Doug: Well, we have some consensus. But I can't do all the work here, so I'll leave it to you to investigate the use of dogs against African-Americans in this country and also religious sensibilities around them. NB: My understanding is that pigs have better noses than even German Shepards, but they aren't used in airports (so far as I know, but I will not rule it out of the realm of CBP possibility) for obvious cultural and religious issues.

Pakistan is not Syria or Afghanistan. Please, here and elsewhere (and for any other commentators), let's at a minimum be able to draw distinctions. And I mean that with all deference and respect, to Syria and Afghanistan, and the plight of Syrians and Afghans.

[Doug Richmond]

The use of dogs against African Americans in this country by police is deplorable, but it cannot be the case that our unfortunate history prevents the use of dogs in law enforcement today to sniff out drugs or explosives. By your logic, because police officers have unjustifiably shot minorities, and have done so repeatedly, we should disarm all police officers.

I am aware that Afghanistan and Syria are different countries than Pakistan, and that they and their people are not interchangeable on all sorts of levels. At the same time, whether you agree or not, all three nations are viewed by the U.S. government as countries in which terrorists operate and from which they export violence. Are you really saying that there are not elements Pakistan who view the U.S. as an enemy? Do you really not think that there are groups in Pakistan that are sponsoring terrorism in some fashion? Including, it might be said, the Pakistani security apparatus? What about Syria, where ISIS operates? Afghanistan? That does not condemn all citizens of these countries, of course, nor does it mean that there is not incalculable suffering there--most obviously in Syria at the moment--but it does mean that the U.S. government has legitimate security concerns when it comes to who travels to and from those countries.

[Jeff Redding]

Doug: I am pretty confident that this is more about 'security theater,' 'intelligence' gathering, and intimidation than about any real concern with security. After all, by the time one has arrived at Secondary Review, one has already passed through many layers of security--including in the Indian and Pakistani airport contexts, physical pat-downs at least twice--and one has also been admitted into and passed through U.S. passport control. (The passport inspection officer refers a person to Secondary Review.) If you go through my previous posts in this series as well, you'll see that I and others had also already gone through *U.S.* Secondary Review in the Abu Dhabi airport. So, yes, I do think this is ridiculous. And Shah Rukh Khan does too: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-17699074. Finally, in the upcoming segments in this series, I'll relate (multiple) experiences in which all my baggage was gone through with, in one instance, a U.S. CBP officer personally telling me "This [procedure] is a waste of my time."

[Doug Richmond]

Or maybe the CBP encounters that have frustrated you demonstrate inefficiency or incompetence or both (security theater fits somewhere in there) rather than racism or homophobia as you originally claimed.

[Douglas Levene]

I recently flew into Hong Kong airport and took a dual-plate van to Shenzhen. At the PRC border crossing, our van was pulled out line, and my wife and I were directed to pull all our luggage out to be searched. Then the van was sent off to be x-rayed and we were left on the curb with no means of transport. (Our driver's boss eventually came and rescued us.) Why did this happen? Was I targeted for some reason? Who knows? Customs and immigration people never explain why they do what they do and in this case I wouldn't have understood if they did explain. (I won't go into the time back when I was in college when I was strip searched coming back into the US from Japan.)

[Just Another Practicing Attorney]

"I am pretty confident that this is more about 'security theater,' 'intelligence' gathering, and intimidation than about any real concern with security."

I don't know about intelligence gathering, but a real concern with security is not at all inconsistent with security theater and intimidation. The goal of most security systems is not to catch the bad guy but to deter him, which means showcasing the strength of the defense in sometimes ostentatious and intimidating ways.