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Racial Profiling Goes Beyond Black and White

By Sasha Polakow-Suransky
Africana.com
Posted on Tuesday October 30, 2001

Eric Hotchandani, a 20-year-old University of California-Santa Barbara student, boarded a packed rush-hour train on the evening of September 21. When the train emptied out, he took the first open seat, next to a middle-aged black man in a suit, and began reading his newspaper. The black man stared at him coldly.

“How’re you doing?” Hotchandani greeted him.

“Not so good anymore,” the man replied.

“Why is that?” Hotchandani asked.

“Look who’s sitting next to me,” the man snapped back.

Hotchandani was taken aback. “Just go ahead and spell this one out for me,” he said.

The man turned to him and asked, “Where were you born?”

Although shocked by the question, Hotchandani answered. “I was born in Brazil, but I have this Indian side to me, which darkens my skin and probably makes you think I’m a terrorist,” he said.

The black man seemed surprised. “Sorry, I thought you were from the Middle East,” he said. But Hotchandani was not satisfied.

“Let’s go ahead and assume that I was,” he said to the man, raising his voice. “What happened in New York on September 11 was done by an extreme group of Muslims who don’t represent Islam or people of my skin color. I’m not here to inflict harm on anyone. I’m just minding my own business.”

“I’m not going to let you do any harm to me,” the black man retorted. “I just don’t feel comfortable with you sitting next to me.”

To the shock and dismay of many African American leaders, polls released in the weeks following September 11 indicate that the views expressed by this black man on a Bay Area train are not uncommon. A Zogby International poll conducted between September 25 and October 8 showed that African American approval of racially profiling Arab-Americans reached a peak of 60% on September 30, compared to 45% among the overall population. The statistics later leveled out with African Americans showing a 45% approval rating by October 8, virtually in line with the 41% figure for other racial groups. Similarly, an October 25 Africana.com poll found that 34% of respondents thought it was “okay” for US law enforcement to racially profile Arabs.

These results have provoked a range of reactions. Urban League President Hugh Price is disturbed. “We should see in these polls’ findings more evidence of the perniciousness of racial profiling itself, no matter how it’s seemingly bolstered by glib or urgently declared rationalizations,” he said. “These polls show that whenever people speak in favor of racial profiling, they always favor its use against some other group, not theirs.”

Others, such as Henry L. Taylor, a University of Buffalo Professor of Architecture and Urban Planning, claim that the results are not representative of general black attitudes because they are based solely on immediate fears of terrorism. “A lot of people, African Americans included, have not looked at the civil implications of these questions,” said Taylor. “Right now we’re in a time period where anything that looks like it will preserve the security of a nation is going to be embraced.”

While the statistics indicating widespread black approval of Arab racial profiling can certainly be attributed in part to a knee-jerk reaction after September 11, there are deeper causes as well. Syndicated columnist Earl Ofari Hutchinson points to religious intolerance and ingrained distrust of Muslims within the African American community. Complex issues such as the presence of Arab-owned convenience stores in predominantly black neighborhoods and the tension between the two communities play into this equation as well. As Hutchinson contends, “Many [blacks] still view all Muslims with the same mix of caution, distrust and hostility, as many white Americans do.”

While such views may be widespread, they are largely based on a false premise. In fact, the majority of Arabs in the United States are not Muslims, they are Syrian and Lebanese Christians. According to the Arab-American Institute, 77 percent of Arabs in America are Christians and only 23 percent practice Islam. Another little known fact further complicates matters: the majority of American Muslims are not Arabs. Statistics from the Council on American-Islamic Relations reveal that most Muslims in the US are of African or South Asian descent—only 25 percent are Arab.

Hutchinson concludes his column, “When the Profiled Become Profilers,” by observing that black support for the racial profiling of others could very well backfire: “Bush has implored Americans to return life back to normalcy. Unfortunately, those blacks who approve racial profiling against Muslims run the grave risk of making sure that racial profiling could be part of that normalcy, and with them once more the prime targets.”

Columnist Clarence Page has similar worries. Page argued in an October 3 Chicago Tribune column that African Americans who say they support the racial profiling of Arabs haven’t thought it through. “The first casualty of war is often rational thinking,” he writes. “It is not going to be easy for us to argue against the unfair profiling of blacks if most of us favor the unfair profiling of Arabs.”

NAACP leaders have expressed similar dismay. “It is unfortunate that it would be African Americans that have suffered this kind of terror and profiling at the hands of the police…to then support this type of profiling,” says Buffalo NAACP President Frank Mesiah.

But New York Daily News columnist Stanley Crouch disagrees. Crouch insists that racial profiling of blacks is qualitatively different than the current profiling of Arabs. While pulling over black motorists involves police officers’ frequently incorrect assumptions about who might commit a crime, Crouch claims that profiling Arabs is not comparable.

“The Arabs-in-America question removes us from the area of speculation and abstract theories about individual freedom,” he argues. “We have had war declared on us by a spider at the center of a web of terrorist cells. Followers of that spider are hiding in the Arab-American community.”

And finally there are some in the African American community who are simply relieved that someone else is the target for once, as a group of black and Latino teenagers in Brooklyn told the New York Times. “The police would probably racially profile everyone that’s here… But now they don’t really bother us. They, like, stop everyone that has Middle Eastern features. They stop them. They ask them questions like that,” said Louis Johnson, an 18-year-old whose parents are from Trinidad.

“We’ve become a little more at ease with the policemen,” agreed Johnson’s Latino friend, Miqueo Rawell-Peterson, 17. “We realize what they’ve done. Now we look at them more as heroes, instead of—I guess, what you’d say, enemies.”

But while black and Latino teenagers enjoy their reprieve from racial profiling, a series of complaints has emerged from profiling’s newfound targets. In the post-September 11 climate, “driving while black” has become “flying while brown” and the most egregious cases to emerge involve men who look “Middle Eastern” being kicked off airplanes after passing through security. All in all, over a dozen men have been denied the right to board or been removed from planes.

In Orlando, two Pakistani businessmen invited to attend a conference by the US Department of Commerce were kicked of a US Airways flight on September 17, despite the fact that they showed a letter of invitation from the US consul. The same day, in San Antonio, Ashraf Kahn was ejected from a Delta flight and, as a result, missed his brother’s wedding in Pakistan. In Minneapolis, Kareem Alasady and two companions were not allowed to board a Northwest flight on September 20.

In Tampa, Mohamed el-Sayed, a US citizen born in Egypt, was barred from boarding a United flight to Washington. United has also kicked several other men off its flights in recent weeks; in Phoenix, Iraqi-American businessman Younadam Youkhana and his companions were forced off a United flight to Chicago, and in Boston, businessman Muhammad Ali was removed, questioned extensively and cleared by law enforcement, and still not allowed to re-board his United flight to Washington.

Worse yet, Ali Khadraoui, an American citizen originally from Algeria, was strip-searched and detained by French police after being kept off of his United flight home to Washington from Paris. Finally, in Seattle, Vahid Zohrehvandi, an Iranian-American engineer and part-time employee of American Airlines, was kicked off a flight operated by his own employer. He was not allowed to fly home to Dallas until the airline found a pilot who agreed to fly with a “Middle Eastern” man on board.

Zohrehvandi’s lawyers, Kelli Evans and Christy Lopez, belong to the Washington-based civil rights firm Relman and Associates, whose attorneys are best known for winning large class action settlements in the recent Denny’s restaurant and Avis Rent-a-Car discrimination suits. The firm is representing several other men kicked off planes as well. Evans and Lopez, both veterans of the US Department of Justice Civil Rights Division, compare Zohrehvandi’s having to wait for a pilot willing to fly him to forcing a customer in a restaurant to wait until a non-discriminatory waitress is willing to serve him. Refusal to provide service to a passenger because of his or her race is illegal, they argue, and federal law appears to be on their side.

The US Code states clearly, “An air carrier or foreign air carrier may not subject a person in air transportation to discrimination on the basis of race, color, national origin, religion, sex, or ancestry.” Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta, himself a victim of Japanese internment during World War II, has vowed to enforce the law. “Protecting the civil rights of our passengers is essential to maintaining the security of our nation, because those civil rights are essential to our most fundamental values,” he declared. “There have been times in our history as a nation when that has been forgotten. I am committed, and the administration is committed, to ensuring that it is never forgotten again.”

But that is not all. Evans and Lopez claim that the airlines’ refusal to transport their clients and other Middle Eastern men is also a violation of contract law—Title 42, Section 1981 of the US Code, to be exact. This provision, an important stride towards racial equality in the Reconstruction era, was originally created in 1870 to ensure that freed slaves could enter the marketplace. It guarantees: “All persons within the jurisdiction of the United States shall have the same right in every State and Territory to make and enforce contracts…and to the full and equal benefit of all laws and proceedings for the security of persons and property as is enjoyed by white citizens.” Today, the same law—designed to dismantle institutionalized anti-black racism in the post-civil war South—could be invoked to defend the civil rights of brown-skinned Middle Eastern and South Asian men kicked off planes.

That the victims of the new racial profiling are being represented by the same firm that brought black Americans some of the most notable anti-discrimination class action victories in recent history is no coincidence. The potential for a broad alliance against arbitrary and unfounded racial profiling has never been greater. But whether the current climate of racial division between blacks and Arabs will give way to such a coalition remains to be seen.

Poll results aside, some Middle Eastern Americans, and others singled out because they look like Arabs, have found that more African Americans seem supportive than suspicious. According to Evans and Lopez, when one of their clients finally managed to board a flight, he received a sympathetic reception from a black flight attendant in first class, who expressed his empathy by offering the beleaguered coach passenger some champagne.

And when confronted with the hostile black man on the Bay Area train, Eric Hotchandani seized the opportunity to speak out, and found a sympathetic audience.

“Do you want me to go to back of the train? Do we have to redo Rosa Parks all over again?” Hotchandani asked the man who had expressed discomfort at his presence, as the whole train grew silent, looking on. “To me you are beyond ignorant. I’m sure you’ve experienced some sort of racism considering that you’re black. If you knew anything about your own history you wouldn’t be doing this. I can’t believe you’re reciprocating this kind of hate—you’re kicking me down when you’ve been kicked before.”

A black man in his mid-20s seated near the two men broke the silence.

“At first I thought this guy was joking with you,” he said, addressing Hotchandani. “Please don’t think all black people think like this.”

The middle aged black man did not respond. At the next stop, he gathered his belongings and left the train. The passengers clapped as he stepped off.