The Other Profile

This is for Dr. Henry Louis Gates Jr., whose misadventure inspired these thoughts, with thanks to Scott M. Sommer of United Auto Workers Region 9, whose Facebook comment lit a firestorm of denial.

Riding the New York City subway—the Number 1 line, that runs from Harlem through Times Square to Greenwich Village and the southern tip of Manhattan—I’m reading the Lonely Planet Guide to Mediterranean Europe. A voice says, “Excuse me,” and I look up and see, sitting across from me, a Black woman more or less my own age, strikingly dressed in clothes that aren’t traditional African garb but evocative of it. “Do you travel much?” she asks.

“A fair amount,” I tell her, and we strike up a conversation about travel. After a bit, she says, “But you know, everything takes longer now, since 9-11. They ask me so many more questions at check-in and security than they used to that it’s actually gotten harder to travel.”

I look at her for a long minute, gauging whether to utter the response that’s on the tip of my tongue, which is, “Not for me.” She and I are, as I have noted, similar in many ways: both New York City urban, both middle-aged, both showing the insignia of a certain level of middle-income comfort. But there’s one salient difference: She’s a middle-aged woman of color, and I’m a middle-aged woman of no color—and as such, invisible to security personnel and police.

That’s not a complaint. For instance, speaking of 9-11, for a few days in mid-September, 2001, southern Manhattan was off-limits to everyone except people who lived or worked there. To travel south of 14th Street, people had to show ID at police checkpoints. People, that is, who weren’t—well, me. I got waved through every time, without producing any identification at all.

Then there was the time I was coming back from Palestine. I had been in the West Bank on a delegation with the California-based Middle East Children’s Alliance. We had been advised to have the Palestinian materials we had collected during the two-week visit mailed to us, rather than attempt to carry them through the Israeli exit check at Ben Gurion airport. We were told that security officers often checked cameras, too, and that if we didn’t want to be questioned and delayed it was wise to move photographs—of, say, the Wall of Separation—off our digital cameras and onto other digital storage media. I spent my last day in the West Bank moving photos and going through everything I had acquired to make sure that on the way out of Israel I couldn’t be identified as pro-Palestinian.

It was wasted work. The Israeli security forces waved me through the way the police officers at 14rh Street had. When I got home, I discovered I had overlooked one item: In a front section of my pocketbook was a beaded bracelet that said, “I [HEART] PALESTINE.”

Once, while on that same delegation, my apparent invisibility extended to half a dozen other people, not all of whom were middle-aged, not all of whom were female (although all of us were in at least one of those categories).

It was the night of the West Bank championship basketball game in Ramallah. We were staying at the Ibdaa Cultural Center of the Dheisheh refugee camp in Bethlehem, and the Ibdaa team had just won the championship from the Bethlehem team. We were on the Ibdaa bus, going back with the team and their coaches from the West Bank into Israel. In other words, the bus held perhaps twenty-some young Palestinian men and seven very pale Americans—five women, most but not all middle-aged, and two middle-aged men.

The bus stopped at the check point into Jerusalem. Several Israeli Defense Force soldiers, all armed, boarded the bus and walked up the aisle, asking each Palestinian youth for ID. They took the IDs, left the bus, huddled outside for half an hour, looking over the IDs with flashlights, then re-boarded the bus and handed back the IDs. Twice, they walked past all seven Americans without stopping or saying a word.

• • •

The recent disorderly-conduct arrest of Black Harvard scholar Dr. Henry Louis Gates Jr., after he spoke with some heat to a white police officer who was demanding that Gates identify himself in his—Gates’—own home, started a national conversation about racial profiling. President Barack Obama even offered his opinion on the subject—twice, the second time moderating if not rescinding his original assertion that the police officer had acted “stupidly.” When my former Metropolitan Council on Housing colleague Scott M. Sommer, now of United Auto Workers Region 9, posted a comment on his Facebook page to the effect that Obama had been right the first time, he ignited an explosion of responses—51 so far, and counting.

None of them, however, noted that racial profiling can and does go in two directions. Indeed, the benefit of the doubt accorded people of no-color happens so often and so routinely that, like me at a checkpoint, it’s usually invisible—at least to most of us who reap that benefit. Sharing stories like these should help make that privilege more visible to everyone.

© Judith Mahoney Pasternak, 2009