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Shahrukh Khan detained at Newark for travelling while brown:
India has asked the US to explain why a leading Bollywood film star was allegedly detained for two hours at Newark airport, which serves New York.
Shah Rukh Khan, who was released after India's embassy in the US intervened, said he felt angry and humiliated.
The actor, who is promoting a film on racial profiling, said he was stopped because he had a Muslim name.
But US customs officials denied that Mr Khan had been detained, saying he was questioned for 66 minutes.
Elmer Camacho, a spokesman for the US Bureau of Customs and Border Protection, said the questioning was part of the agency's routine process to screen foreign travellers, the Associated Press news agency reports. BBC
It's not that Shahrukh Khan was detained for a couple of hours because some shmuck in Immigrations thought he might be a terrorist because his surname was wrong and he was travelling while brown: racists show up everywhere but are particularly obvious at airports. (There was an incident at Heathrow ten years ago where the British Ambassador to Jamaica was told that as he was travelling on a one-way ticket he would have to show evidence from his employer that he was going to a job in Jamaica before he could be allowed out of the UK: the British Airways employee tasked with making trouble for people travelling while black evidently couldn't believe a black man really was in possession of a diplomatic passport.)
It's that the US government defends this as a "routine process". That's why I won't go to the US: where racist treatment at immigration is defended as "routine", even when it means former Presidents trying to travel via US airlines get "routinely" searched.
Shahrukh Khan was able to contact the Indian Embassy and ask them to intervene. But an ordinary guy traveling while brown surnamed Khan would just have had to put up with it, for as long as the "routine" process of harassment and discrimination happened to last.
(At Heathrow, my bag was searched right after a guy going to India's bag was searched: mine because, once through the security check at Glasgow, I'd bought a bottle of water at Boots - which was taken away from me because I might make a bomb with it - his because he'd packed a tin of Coffeemate. He was more worried than I was, and with good reason - he repeated several times "I haven't done anything wrong" to which the white woman searching his carry-on bag would say "no, I just have to do this" - while I looked away at the wall after realising that he'd packed a basic short-stay carry-on bag and I was sure he didn't want a total stranger watching as his underwear got unfolded...)
As has been noted in the Globe and Mail, Canada also has racist harassment at airports of people travelling while brown - and serious issues with how the Canadian government treats Muslim citizens arriving or departing: Abousfian Abdelrazik is still trying to reclaim full Canadian citizenship after being arrested and exported for torture.
I do believe, though, that the US government is the only power simply saying "Yes, we do these things, and it's legal for us to do so." Barack Obama's administration has made no change to George W. Bush's claims that the US has the legal right to kidnap, send to indefinite extrajudicial detention, and torture prisoners: in fact, Obama has plans to expand the prison camp for US kidnap victims at Bagram Airbase, which has sections where even the Red Cross are not allowed admittance, and from which no legal appeal is permitted, not even habeus corpus: the writ which requires a person detained by the authorities to be brought before a court of law so that the legality of the detention may be examined.
Current Mood: 
angry
angry