Homeland Insecurity
I was in a good mood when I entered old National Airport in Washington, DC on Sunday September 25 to fly back to Atlanta where I live. Much of the hallway banter at the Congress had dwelt upon the recent execution of Troy Davis in Georgia, a seemingly clear-cut case where “reasonable doubt” was quite strong, but historic race prejudice quite a bit stronger. I had heard Charles Ogeltree talk about his new book on the racial profiling of high profile African American men, such as I had experienced most recently while bike riding in the city of Decatur in Georgia. And I had done my part, encouraging enthusiastic crowds read my book The Indignant Generation, an exploration of black writers and their novels and criticism that transformed American racial attitudes between 1934 and 1960.
While I stood in a deep line awaiting the metal detecting machines, I was approached by a portly uniformed Asian American woman, who asked me “Can I swipe your hands.” I had seen her looking the crowd over and I had decided in advance to decline an opportunity to participate in the trial-runs of any new surveillance technology. I was being literary, as in Herman Melville. I said to her, “No thank you. I prefer not.”
And then the war began.
She returned to her machine a few feet away, crestfallen and benumbed, as if she had been denied a phone number at a dance. She whispered to another TSA coworker, “He said no,” and another young woman, a Latina named Ashley Miranda and an African American woman named Danielle Dorrall talked back and forth about what the next step should be. Ms. Dorrall said, loud enough for me to hear, “It’s your option.” They were all in their early twenties, and the Asian American woman, whom I never saw clearly again for the next 75 minutes which I was detained, went to fetch a supervisor.
After a minute or two Barbara Toya appeared, tall and upright, slightly gray, and triumphant. She asked to see my ticket and identification, which she held onto, and she said that if I did not then take the test I would have to submit to additional measures. With a gleam that appeared to give her joy, she told me that I would miss my flight. Thus, I became, in my own mind at least, a bit stubborn. I felt unjustly threatened and as if Ms. Toya was trying to intimidate me. So I told her I had no intention of agreeing to have my hands swiped as part of a random sample group and that I believed this was clearly an optional procedure that all passengers were not subjected to. I added that I also had no intention of walking through a magnetic resonance imaging device and if they wanted to undertake further elaborate measures that was their choice or duty.
Toya disappeared with my documents and the other junior officers separated me from the other passengers, but no one seemed clear where I should go. I wanted to be screened and take advantage of an airline ticket I had paid for, but I declined to participate in experiments. Ms. Dorrall assumed charge and requested that I stand in the special queue for the disabled and airline personnel; but she wasn’t sure precisely what a safe distance was and when I asked where I should leave my bag she kept saying “there.” Finally I asked her, “Why don’t you just show me what you mean?” I had been transported and my English no longer served me, as it hadn’t when I retrieved my boarding pass from an electronic machine that seemed capable of communicating only in Spanish.
A Hispanic looking TSA officer, short, about thirty and filling out his clothes, looked at me intensely and wrote in a notebook the entire time. After some interlude Ms. Toya arrived with a handsome-looking man in a suit, Donny Love, as my “prefer not” went up the chain of command. Mr. Love told me point blank that they would not pass me through screening without having my hands swiped, a consideration given to passengers randomly and at the ease of TSA personnel. His mandate struck me as absurd. I told him that I knew at least some of my constitutional rights, though invasion of privacy did not come to my lips. Then I let him know—black like me and Ms. Toya though he was--that I considered this a newsworthy event in the publicly humiliating sport of racial profiling. (It might be worth knowing that I look more like one of Ghaddafi’s sons than the “other” Lawrence Jackson, the Seattle Seahawks defensive end.) I told Mr. Love that I had just come from the Congressional Black Caucus and I was not about to be treated like this! Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Martin Luther King III (whom I would glad-hand after the flight to talk about the new book) passing through security. “Sir,” I asked Mr. Love, “Will you please show me in writing this rule about the requirements of airline passenger screening at federally regulated sites.” I was convinced that they were making-up portions of the story.
One thing can be said for Mr. Love: he didn’t waste time on a problem that he couldn’t solve. He departed swiftly, his minions in tow, leaving a very pretty DC police officer to come up and keep me company. Only, after she surmised the situation, and the brother involved, decided that she had better uses for her time, and left me in the hands of Ms. Dorrall, her unarmed junior soror. Ms. Dorrall became talkative and wanted to know how dare I use a term like “racial profiling,” as evil in her heavily mascaraed eyes as affirmative action no doubt—the Lil Wayne-style politics of the younger generation for you. I admitted to her that “we might not, right here, be capable of having a productive conversation about this topic because you are talking to a forty-three-year-old African American man who has been heavily, aggressively, and most violently racially profiled since he was sixteen.”
But, the teacher in me tried to plant a little seed. (The best thing I learned at the CBC Conference? Human dancing, which is to say African dancing, grows out of an agricultural ritual: right foot digs the hole in the ground, left hand casts the seed, left foot covers it up. What a revelation and see if it don’t work!) I told the young transport authority, “The federal and state cases in this matter use statistics over time to prove racial profiling; it doesn’t have much to do with personal observation or individual bias, its about longstanding patterns of discrimination over time.” Or something like that. She wasn’t impressed and I felt a bit like I needed to impress her to steady my own resistance. And they were breaking me down, making me feel like I had on those gloves and earmuffs and goggles that you wear on your way to the secret rendition sites for waterboarding. No one in the line wanted to make eye contact with me, the potential terrorist, nor did anyone dare to ask why the man with his jaw set was standing alone talking to security people. I knew that if I took out a camera to film my side of the story, it would have been on like I was named Bin Laden.
So they took the “prefer not” all the way to the top. A Caribbean brother who ran the shop, Inspector Herman Williams came out. I was about an hour into the event by then, standing with my backpack with my computer in it and my rain coat still on. Williams was bald headed and wearing commando gear, like he had his submachine gun by the desk, just in case. He was vigorous and I told him that I couldn’t understand this. I had been presented with an option at a random screening. I declined on principle and was informed that I had to undergo additional security precautionary measures, which I agreed to. Now I was being told I had no choice but to submit to the first procedure that a young person requested me to participate in. No one asks you if you would like to walk through the metal detector or to put your cell phone in a plastic tub and run it through the scanner; you have to do it. So I asked again to see their protocol in writing because I was certain that the constitution protected me, three-fifths of me at least, I thought in the back of my mind. Inspector Williams said, “ It’s in the SSI.” But he thought it wise to return to his office to check.
After another five or ten minutes, the Inspector returned. “I assure you Mr. Jackson, the Sensitive Security Information guidebook requires you to have your hands swiped for explosives before being admitted beyond the screening area. But you can’t see it. It’s secret.”
Well, there it was. It was illegal for the citizen to examine the book of facts and rules that determined the nature of his rights in that particular portion of the sovereign territory of the United States. I caved in to the Inspector, which was easy to do, since he could be damned charming when the occasion called for it, and he decided to ease glare that had been Ms. Toya’s technique. He admitted that my rights were probably being violated, but it was for my own good, and he gave me his card and tried to assure that the homegrown terrorists were the worst ones. I gave them my paws to swipe, and they all acted surprised when they were clean. Williams stayed around until I went through the metal detector, with a copper bracelet and seventy-five undetected cents. He even asked why they took me aside to be frisked, and I told him that as long as I had a choice I would not go through the magnetic resonance imaging scanner. I trusted the surgeon general exactly as much as I trusted any other government; I preferred the government of my own common sense.
I am not bothered over-much by the fact that random hand swipes by bored, lethargic twenty-somethings seem to me about as protective at airport security as making sure that identification matches the airline ticket which is printed from a personal computer on a piece of paper from Office Depot. Or that real fraud takes place with the security companies who produce technologies that assuage the nightmares manufactured on the theater that is the evening news. Rather, I am concerned that my minor inconvenience was a colossal waste of intelligent people’s time. Truly a colossus of waste, and this profligate bureaucracy was ham-handed on the people by the same zealots who say they want small “gubment.”
There was really no small irony that Toya and Love and Williams might really be doing something better than flagging a man whose ancestors probably arrived in 1683 when the English traded for men along the Gambia River, and whose E1a1 haplogroup ancestor had some chance of having been Muslim himself. And though I was raised and am raising my children to worship at the feet of Jesus, the Lamb, and the TSA officials probably do to, I wouldn’t be surprised if they shared a West African muslim ancestor or two.
And then, on the other hand, what if that really was all they had to do, “check the check to check the check” as they say in Wendell Harris’ Chameleon Street? What if that giant bureaucracy really has no place to go, and little to do, except come up with new measures of surveillance and new things to outlaw? What if the keep inventing new manuals and protocols of legal might that you can never see?
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Lawrence Jackson is professor of English and African American Studies. Professor Jackson earned his Ph.D. at Stanford University in 1997, and he began his teaching career at Howard University in Washington, DC. He joined Emory’s faculty in 2002, the year his biography, Ralph Ellison: Emergence of Genius, was published. His most recent book is called The Indignant Generation: A Narrative History of African American Writers and Critics, 1934-1960(Trailer.) (Princeton 2010). His forthcoming books include From the Staunton to the Dan: Slavery, the Civil War and an Afro-Virginian Familyand a biography of Chester Himes. He has lectured widely in the United States and abroad, and he was featured in a 2002 documentary on Ralph Ellison’s life. Professor Jackson offers courses primarily in 19th and 20th century African American literature and culture, shaped by his interest in urban studies, social class formation, realism and modernism, popular culture, black nationalism, and decolonization theory. Dr. Jackson's website can be found at lawrencepatrickjackson.com
