Bastion of Free Speech

A friend of a friend, a top executive in a top US firm, was sitting in the first class cabin of a domestic flight, all strapped in and waiting to take off. Suddenly a voice came over the intercom, "Sivaraman Krishnaswamy (name changed for this article), could you please identify yourself?". He did. They requested him to take his overhead baggage and step out of the plane. When he did, he found his checked in baggage waiting. After 20 minutes of searching questions, during which the plane took off, they told him the pilot had expressed some discomfort flying with him on board. They agreed to put him on the next flight.

The San Francisco Bay Area is home to the most prosperous (and probably the largest) Indian community in the USA. The community has been lionized by the press and the politicians, with many famous high-tech entrepreneurs among its members. An Indian acquaintance from the Bay Area told me she was now scared to step out of her apartment, because she had received threatening looks from several people in the last few days. And she had heard there had been half-a-dozen cases of attempted arson on Indian-owned homes.

Suddenly, many Indians have discovered that racial profiling is wrong.

The same people that would cheerfully hold forth on everything that was wrong with blacks (all on the strength of a couple of kids they'd seen with a boom box), and allow that New Jersey cops were only doing their duty based on statistics, when they pulled over a black driver, are suddenly outraged that their right to travel may be affected.

What is wrong with racial profiling anyway? When India is reputed to have the world's finest software engineers, Indians are not shy of capitalizing on this advantage. Indian papers and magazines are not reticent about proclaiming this prowess - one might be forgiven for thinking we were a nation of Einsteins. At any rate, in the past decade alone, thousands of Indians have obtained jobs, unseen by their employer, because of this perception. Even in more traditional fields, when Marwaris are seen as smart businesspeople, or Punjabis as industrious, we all revel in these accolades. Is all this not a form of racial profiling?

This is so totally off the mark, you say. What's happening is unfair because Indians are mistakenly being targeted where they should really be targeting Arabs! This is like Billy Bunter's answer, "I never touched the cake...Besides, it tasted terrible! If racial profiling is acceptable, then how convincingly can we balk at its miscarriages, especially when we are protesting mere inconveniences while having silently countenanced (and joined in) far more pernicious inflictions on others? After all, as so many Indians have observed privately, and some publicly, better to have a few people harrassed or even illegally detained, than for a plane to be blown up. Some have even suggested that every Middle-Easterner be deported from the US! (This demand has become a little muted since it was revealed that a couple of people from Hyderabad were among those in the FBI dragnet.)

Prejudice literally means pre-judging, that is, judging without facts. This happens every day in life. We all do it. We have inflicted it on others all our lives. Now that we are a little on the receiving end, we have our underpants all in an uproar. What hypocrisy! What sham!

The same person from the Bay Area who told me about her getting dirty looks wondered aloud whether, under the circumstances, she should attend a cultural function in Union City that evening. She added it was a that kind (high black population) neighborhood to start with.

Any case weakens when we apply principles selectively. In the current situation, when all the September 11 hijackers appear to be from a particular place, and can generally be told apart from the general population, it would be absurd for the security agencies not to take this fact into account. Unfortunately the average American, including the security guard, cannot distinguish Madrasi from Madrassa, and everyone must live with the consequences.

It is this general ignorance, after all, which is at the heart of the problem.

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