If you thought DWB (Driving While Black) was an issue for African Americans, get ready for FWB (Flying While Black) and maybe, even, BMYOBWB (Breathing and Minding Your Own Business While Black).
Why do I say that?
Let’s just start with the fact that, recently, U.S. mainstream media reports have been obsessed, in the main, with three stories – the ongoing military tension between North and South Korea, the impending “Royal Wedding” of Prince William and the overwhelming headline-grabber: the continuing, Transportation Security Administration(TSA) "scanner" and "pat down" saga.
Despite the fact that the North Korea issue may very well be the precursor to World War III, most news reports have not provided the detail and sense of urgency the issue truly deserves, allowing the Obama administration to get away with empty statements about having a "unified" response from "world leaders."
Most astute observers know that the attack by North Korea had very little to do with "the world" and almost everything to do with that country testing U.S. resolve to defend one of its most visible allies in Asia. There will definitely be more to talk about on that issue, but, so far, our news coverage has been consistently skimpy, with no real difference between that offered by left-leaning or right-leaning media outlets. This is one to watch.
Frankly speaking, the "royal wedding" story is absolutely irrelevant – not just to African Americans, but to virtually everyone else in this country. Let’s face it, the U.S. hasn’t been a British Colony for more than 200 years, now, and the ongoing obsession, by American media, with all things British – especially the country's “royal family,” seems more than a bit odd.
So, let’s move on to the "Big Kahuna" – the "pat down" story. Everywhere you looked, over the past few months, there were people being scanned and people complaining about being scanned. There was the guy who coined the now-viral and ubiquitous “Don’t touch my junk” phrase, who threatened to sue the TSA for sexual harassment. Making things things even livelier were the TSA’s own threats to cause travelers to miss their flights, or to be fined, if they didn’t submit to potentially dangerous "x-ray" scans, or intrusive “pat-downs.”
Regrettably, in the midst of all of this frenzy, what was being missed was the ominous and growing discussion about “racial profiling” as the alternative form of airline security, if people continue to insist on being, neither, scanned, nor patted.
A syndicated columnist named Delaney Murdock wrote recently: “The current threat to passengers and airlines comes almost exclusively from one source, and we all know what it is, young males , between 18 and 35… from the Middle East, as well as largely Muslim nations in Africa and south Asia.” Indeed, according to CBS News, in November, a growing number of people across the country are wondering whether "the time has come to consider using racial and other profiling as a security measure."
In the wake of the constant barrage of “Don’t Touch My Junk” stories, including video of toddlers being aggressively and intrusively searched in airports, we're beginning to see a shift in attitudes toward a greater public acceptance of racial profiling at those checkpoints. In fact, in a recent CBS News poll, 37 percent of Americans reported that they now believe that “it would be justified for people of certain racial or ethnic groups to be subjected to additional security checks at airport checkpoints.”
Even scarier were the results of a Washington Post-ABC News poll, wherein 70 percent of respondents agreed with selecting certain passengers for extra security screening at airports. Perhaps the most surprising part of that survey was that 32 percent said a person’s sex should be a factor in deciding whether they should be screened; 39 percent said a person’s religion should be a factor and 40 percent said a person’s race should be a factor, when profiling is actually done. Are Americans more nervous about flying with any type of black person than they are about flying with any type of Muslim? Looks that way.
Perhaps someone should pass that bit of information along to our friend, the African-American journalist Juan Williams, who disclosed in his now-infamous interview on Fox Cable Network that seeing people in Muslim garb on a plane made him nervous. As a result, of course, Mr. Williams was fired from his job as a news analyst at NPR, but received a new, lucrative contract from the conservative-leaning Fox Network.
Do you think it would be a surprise to Juan to learn that his co-workers at Fox are probably more afraid to fly with other Williamses than they are to fly with people with Arabic names and burnooses?
Unlike our good brother Juan, seeing Muslims on planes doesn"t make me especially nervous. What does make me nervous, however, is the prospect of greater levels of racial profiling on airlines in the wake of a growing pattern of black, African terrorists being splashed across our newspaper covers, on broadcast outlets and on the Internet. Have you noticed, or is it just me?
About 11 months ago, there was young Umar Farouk Adbulmutallab, the Nigerian who boarded a flight from Amsterdam to Detroit and allegedly tried to activate an explosive device inside his own underwear. The face of terrorism, I thought, right then and there, was starting to be changed. No more stereotypical, Semitic, Middle Eastern-looking people; now the "bad guys" were people who looked just like people in my own family. That made me nervous.
In that same vein, recently, there was the widely circulated story of the Tanzanian-born, Guantanamo Bay detainee Ahmed Ghailani, who we’re told, was instrumental in attacks in 1998 on the U.S. embassies in both Kenya and in his native country.
The larger issue for African Americans is that the media focus on Ghailani stands as further, visible affirmation that black folks on planes shouldn’t be trusted quite as much as they used to be and, in fact, that they probably need to be treated as significant security risks.
As I implied earlier, that's becoming more and more uncomfortable every day for me and for anyone who looks like me. Things are becoming as unfair for us in the air as they have been, for so long, on the ground. This is all unfolding, and the "racial-profiling mob" is being formed, even as the country is fully aware of the fundamental unfairness of such policies, and that they simply don’t work.
In 2006, for example, the NYC Police Department stopped a half-million pedestrians for suspected criminal involvement; 89 percent of the stops involved non-whites. And right here, in Philadelphia , in 2010, the ACLU recently filed a lawsuit against the City’s "Stop and Frisk" policy of random "pat downs" of “suspicious” individuals, because it’s been found that 72 percent of pedestrians that were stopped were African Americans.
Drug-related and weapons-related crimes are far and away the leading causes for arrests and convictions in this country. This move to racial profiling is happening, however, despite clear evidence that young blacks are significantly less inclined to be drug abusers than whites (3% vs. 10%) and despite the fact that Opinion Research Center has informed us that U.S.gun owners are predominantly “white, Protestant, rural and of middle and upper middle class.”
None of those facts, apparently, prevented black male incarceration rates, in 2007, from standing at 4,618 per 100,000 persons vs. 773 per 100,000 persons, for white males.
Thanks to the growing movement toward legitimization of airline-based racial profiling, we, in the black community, should probably get prepared to experience even more onerous treatment right here on the ground than we've seen in the past.
For black folks, it seems, it’s going to be more and more difficult to find “the friendly skies” ...or the friendly streets.
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