Our Racial Problem

I know that Barack Obama's election ended all racial strife in America, but somebody forgot to tell the TSA.

Officials ordered nine Muslim passengers, including three young children, off an AirTran flight headed to Orlando from Reagan National Airport yesterday afternoon after two other passengers overheard what they thought was a suspicious remark.

Members of the party, all but one of them U.S.-born citizens who were headed to a religious retreat in Florida, were subsequently cleared for travel by FBI agents who characterized the incident as a misunderstanding, an airport official said. But the passengers said AirTran refused to rebook them, and they had to pay for seats on another carrier secured with help from the FBI.

Kashif Irfan, one of the removed passengers, said the incident began about 1 p.m. after his brother, Atif, and his brother's wife wondered aloud about the safest place to sit on an airplane.

"My brother and his wife were discussing some aspect of airport security," Irfan said. "The only thing my brother said was, 'Wow, the jets are right next to my window.' I think they were remarking about safety."

Serves them right, making small talk to one another on a plane. While being dark-skinned and Muslim-looking at that!

The TSA and AirTran ended up taking everyone off the plane and re-screening them and their luggage, before allowing them to take off - only without that trouble-making family. According to TSA, this is an example of the system working.

Ellen Howe, a spokeswoman for the Transportation Security Administration, said the pilot acted appropriately.

"For us, it just highlights that security is everybody's responsibility," Howe said. "Someone heard something that was inappropriate, and then the airline decided to act on it. We certainly support [the pilot's] call to do that."

In a society suffused with the "TIPS" program and Total Information Awareness and calls to "watch what you say" and to be on the lookout for suspicious activity, this is what we get. Those cultural signifiers are not easily washed away, the urge to be "alert" and "ready" and "aware" and "on watch". And ultimately, there are very strict, not-even-subliminal definitions on who we have to watch and who we don't have to watch. And ethnicity is the dividing line.

George Bush may be leaving office, but the culture of paranoia he helped to usher in most certainly has not. And deputizing Americans to be part of a 300-million-strong network of spies has impacts on public policy, too. After all, how far is it to leap from eavesdropping on conversations at the mall to eavesdropping on phone calls? As long as you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to worry about, from a civil liberties standpoint.

One of the biggest changes a President Obama can make, if he cares too, is in the national mood, to reject this presumption of guilt, this culture of fear, this demonization of the other, this automatic transfer of second-class citizenship. There's no kind of profiling that is more justifiable than any other. It's all part of a creeping assault on our collective civil liberties and it has to stop.

Making the Political Personal

Maybe because flying is something we all do and something we all dread, and because we've all been shafted by the airlines at least once or twice, yesterday's hearing about the closeness between airline chiefs and the FAA struck a nerve. But it's part and parcel of a continuing project to delegitimize regulation of any kind by installing as the chief regulators of industry the very people who headed those industries in the first place.

Three veteran Federal Aviation Administration inspectors told lawmakers on Thursday that their agency supervisors looked the other way while Southwest Airlines neglected to inspect planes as required, and continued to fly them even after discovering cracks in some of them.

The inspectors said that their F.A.A. supervisors knew of the problems but had discouraged them from pursuing the safety problems or addressing problems within the agency, even threatening to relieve them of their duties.

One was removed from his job as an office manager and another was encouraged to apply for a transfer, they said. A third said he was temporarily removed from his role overseeing Southwest, as a result of complaints by the airline.

It's just one example, but because we have a real stake in it, because our lives were basically put at risk because the FAA was in bed with Southwest Airlines, it made a real impact. You know, we all know that the President is eliminating numerous laws government the environment and Native American land management to put up his border fence, but most of us don't live there. We know that the military is using the FBI to obtain all kinds of private records on Americans, including phone and financial data, but we don't know which one of us is having their privacy invaded. We know that the Justice Department is firing lawyers not only for their political affiliation but their sexual orientation, but we aren't those lawyers, and while many of us have been victims of discrimination, it's still abstract. We know that private military contractors are unaccountable monsters whose employees commit crimes like rape and are never held to account, but we aren't involved intimately in the case. The airline issue is maybe a smaller thing, though if there was a crash it would have been scandalous. But we all have a stake in it. We all have a history with it. We can very easily see ourselves on that faulty airplane.

The project for progressives is to connect that feeling of outrage to the systematic conservative goal to deregulate all industry to maximize corporate profit. It's to connect this explicitly to conservatism, not George Bush or some other random legislator. This is a CONSERVATIVE vision of America.