The idea of African Americans' hair as terrorist threat is absurd, but apparently our unruly locks strike fear into white America
What does America's Transportation Security Agency (TSA) believe that black people are holding in our hair before we board planes?
I was forced to ask myself this question just days ago when two TSA agents halted the security line at Los Angeles International Airport to search my shoulder-length curls for weapons of war. As the country moves into the busy holiday travel season, countless more black and brown Americans with natural hair will be forced to query the same.
Over the past year, "natural hair pat downs" have taken place with greater reported frequency. The fact that they occur at all underscores that America's post-racial future still has roots in its racist past.
With a twice-elected black man as the country's chief executive, how could the TSA get it so wrong?
In the case of people of color v the TSA, it's man v the machine, apparently. "I have to do what the machine says," declared one of the TSA agents as he pointed wanly to the full-body scanner behind me. "When the machine can't read through your hair, we have to search it."
The machine to which he was referring is the $170,000 per unit x-rays devices that can penetrate clothes and certain types of body tissue in order to highlight hidden weapons and objects. The scanners were so effective, in fact, that they raised privacy concerns in the US regarding nudity, which the TSA was forced to address. Citing health concerns, the European Commission effectively banned their use in the European Union just months ago.
Still, these machines, which have cost the US government almost $150m, reveal almost everything – except what might be hidden in black hair. By the results of the TSA scanners, kinky black hair barely registers as human tissue. The unknowing nature of our heads gives the TSA license to violate our bodies.
I wasn't the first to have a TSA agent search my hair – and I won't be the last. Actor Gabrielle Union and pop star Solange Knowles – Beyonce's sister – have both experienced it. Since I posted my patdown on Twitter,
professors, executives, and even aides to members of Congress have all told me their TSA stories. Most far worse than mine. One declared, "I thought it was just me." Clearly, it's not.
Both mainstream and niche media outlets have reported on this phenomenon, which has mushroomed in the last 12 months. Type in "natural hair patdowns" in any search engine and you can spend the better part of an afternoon reading testimonials and watching video of black people's encounters with the TSA.
In response to complaints of its citizens, the response is silence. The TSA failed to answer a request by me for comment on the issue.
The fact that "natural hair patdowns" have reached a fever pitch recently, four years after the machines were introduced, suggests that there's something else at work. The machines didn't just stop working on black hair all at once. The problem may not lie with machines, but with the men and women running the TSA. It wouldn't be the first time.
Hastily put together after 9/11, the TSA has struggled with charges of racial bias from the beginning. Many Arab-American groups filed formal complaints of racial profiling by the TSA in the immediate years after the attack. Civil liberties group, such as the ACLU, reported receiving up to 1,000 complaints a month about invasive TSA searches. Just last year, TSA agents in Boston cited their colleagues for zeroing in on people of color.
A key part of the TSA's response to 9/11 seems to be the identification of certain groups as the "other", followed by a systematic targeting of that group for physical scrutiny. The "otherization" of black people by the TSA is nothing new in America.
Classifying black physical characteristics as alien and subhuman was essential to European rationalization of the brutality meted out to people of African descent during slavery. Torture and sexual assault were all excused because of the "otherness" of the black body. But slavery was only a precursor to the violence directed against blacks during the years after Emancipation and Reconstruction.
Once blacks gained freedom, whites in the South became obsessed with new ways to control the black body. The largest homegrown terrorist organization of its day – the Klu Klux Klan – emerged to create a climate a fear among African Americans through the public mutilation of black bodies. The goal was to spur mass migration of blacks out of the South and to intimidate those who remained into political, as well as economic, subservience. It worked. Formerly pro-slavery whites regained political control of the South by using these tactics.
TSA actions connect directly with this past. At precisely the time when people of color in America have greater political authority than ever, the TSA – along with the New York Police Department through "stop-and-frisk" harassment, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), and local law enforcement agencies – have targeted black and brown bodies for intrusive and demeaning treatment.
Of the 700,000 New Yorkers detained under "stop-and-frisk" in 2011 alone, eight out of ten were black or Latino. INS deportations of undocumented men and women reached a high of 400,000 last year. Nine out of ten of those expelled from the US were from four countries in Latin America. As online racial justice resource Colorlines reports, 25% of those sent back home had US citizens as children. Control of black and brown bodies has become a new dividing line in America.
The good news is that we live in 2012, not 1912, or 1812. The person leading the US, Barack Obama, represents the best that the country can be. In order to fulfil this promise, America will have to rely on him to help turn back its remaining ugly tendencies. Action on the TSA policy of searching black hair would be a great place to start.
