Zeeshan Suhail

Thanks to Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab, the Nigerian who tried to bomb a flight en route to Detroit, Michigan (USA) from Amsterdam, Netherlands, all people of colour were now going to be looked at with double suspicion and treated unfairly

After spending my not-so-white Christmas in the American capital, I discovered some relatively inexpensive tickets for Columbus, Ohio and decided this was the perfect time for my winter getaway. Since offices are nearly always closed between Christmas and New Year’s Day, it did not make sense for me to stay in Washington, DC. Better to make use of my time off and spend some much-needed downtime with my family.

My journey to Columbus was just over an hour by plane, but would have been around eight hours or so by car. Contrast this with a flight to New York City (NYC) from DC, which is much more than an hour, yet only four hours or so by car. What a conundrum! If I were teaching a class right now, I would announce a $100 prize to whoever could explain why this is the case. Shall I give a clue? Does traffic congestion ring a bell? Yes, you guessed it; to land at any of the NYC metro area airports (there are three), planes must get in a long line of aircraft assembled in a straight line all awaiting instructions from the control tower on when and how they can land.

I must say that a landing at NYC’s LaGuardia airport is a must for anyone who visits that city. Planes usually make a u-turn to land at this one particular runway (perhaps always the same for domestic flights?) and to do so requires a certain precision from the pilot’s side. I would love to see a plane do this over and over again. We do not realise this often, but the sight of an airplane taking off, flying and landing is really quite something. Human ingenuity, in my humble opinion, really reached its zenith — paradoxically — when it realised that nature held all the secrets to human innovation and invention. What is an aircraft, but a larger, mechanical version of a bird?

Alas, I digress. My time in Columbus was pleasant, enjoyable and relaxing — everything a vacation should be. With not a care in the world, my cousin and I spent a leisurely afternoon at the cinema where I finally got a chance to see Avatar — in IMAX 3D. Talk about entertainment! James Cameron, Avatar’s director, certainly outdid himself. Not only is the film one of the most expensive ever made, it is also one of the highest grossing of all time. This should not be surprising though; after all, Cameron made Titanic. The only thing to sink in that film was the ship — the rest not only floated, but rose quite high: the accolades, the earnings and the fan following.

My journey back to DC was more arduous though. After a nice week away from any troubles, I was rudely awakened to the sad realities of our existence here as immigrants/expatriates in America. As soon as I passed through the metal detector at Columbus’s airport, a security officer whisked me aside and requested me to keep both palms of my hand upward as he proceeded to rub a cotton swab diagonally in two straight lines across both hands. He walked to the side, analysed the results in a machine and thanked me for my time. He wished me well and while I should have been relieved, I was troubled. I sat down on the other side of the security checkpoint, tied my shoelaces and discreetly observed the passengers making their way through the metal detectors. Perhaps one of them would be asked to the side, like I was? But, no. Thirty passengers must have passed by, yet only one was waved aside — a fellow South Asian. This poor soul had his entire luggage checked not once, but twice. Novice traveller, I thought to myself.

Then it dawned on me, this ‘random’ checking was not so random anymore! It all made sense to me now. Thanks to Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab, the Nigerian who tried to bomb a flight en route to Detroit, Michigan (USA) from Amsterdam, Netherlands, all people of colour were now going to be looked at with double suspicion and treated unfairly, even if it meant violating established rules and regulations which clearly stipulated that racial profiling was not to be practised. It is simply unconstitutional. Yet the world we live in allows for different standards to be maintained for different people. Americans, sadly, know this all too well. For centuries, African Americans and Native Americans were treated as nearly sub-human, even though the blood that coursed through their veins was just as red as that of the ‘new’ Americans.

This stark realisation was my New Year gift. As millions of people around the world struggle with all sorts of hardships, my New Year’s resolution has been to continue to affirm the equality and humanity of ALL people. This is a valuable lesson I learned from America, and I hope this country revisits its own history to learn that mutual understanding and the cultivation of a truly open society is the way civilisations develop. A new year, in fact, a new decade has dawned upon us. We have a clean slate in front of us. Let us not soil it too much, too soon.

Zeeshan Suhail is a consultant with the World Bank in Washington DC and a board member of Americans for Informed Democracy (AID). He can be reached at zeeshan@aidemocracy.org