For this spotlight of the Diary of Systemic Injustices assignment I decided to share with you all my final diary entry. It is about the systemic injustices in airports. Last week I decided to explore the systemic injustices that are found in traveling, more specifically I wanted to look into airports. We are all probably very familiar with how strict TSA security is in the airports today after going through the tragedy of the 9/11 terrorist attack. However, now there are issues in the system that people have to encounter and fight through every single day because of their nationality, culture, clothes, religion and color of skin. I found an article during my research of how injustices are found in airports, I found an article from The Guardian that is titled “How It Feels. to be Racially Profiled While Traveling”. In this article there is statements from interviews from real people who are still experiencing racial profiling and injustices today during traveling. There was one woman by the name of Katie who is a mixed African-British woman who travels frequently. She discusses that she is often pulled to the side and searched extra. But she talks about one specific scenario where she was screened more and the TSA agents found her sheet music in the suitcase because she plays music, and they asked if it was code and then interrogated her. She mentioned that she always plans for extra time needed in her traveling schedule due to security screening. Another person by the name of Uzair discusses his experiences with racism in traveling. He recalls a time that after his flight landed at the final destination that he was pulled off from the plane and questioned. He mentions that he was the only ethnic minority on the flight and said he could only imagine what the rest of the flight thought of this. Issues like this are seen every day in airports and other public transportation facilities. As a white girl I have only one time been taken aside for extra screening due to a makeup wipe I had in my suitcase that through a question during security. However, I was treated with respect. I know this is not the case for many others who are racially profiled. What is happening every day in the airports is not okay and it needs to be fixed. Each person should be treated the same and no one should be assumed to be a threat unless everyone is assumed to be a threat. To bring it back to a connection we can make from the past nine weeks of learning and reading in this course, I thought of connecting it to Recitatif because of the racial divide that is seen towards the later end of the story. The specific example I am thinking of is when the girls meet for the first time after growing up when Roberta wouldn’t speak to Twyla and then later on she explains it’s because the whites and blacks don’t mix. This is immediately what I thought about for racial profiling.
Citations:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/apr/12/racially-profiled-while-travelling-discrimination-passengers-security
https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702304632204579336984217416844
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/feb/08/tsa-screening-racial-religious-profiling-aclu-study
I like how your post gives real people’s stories and examples of racial profiling at airports. Sometimes when we hear actual names in regards to systemic injustices, it can bring more attention the situation.
Calla,
Thanks for sharing! This is a perfect example of systemic injustice and one I never even thought of. After reading this post, I started thinking how many times my family and I have never gotten questioned or searched when in the airports, mainly because we are white. Security and TSA definitely single out minority groups and search them more often, which is not fair to those individuals. Great topic to choose!