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A Different Kind of Security Theater Problem
By
The singer-songwriter Vance Gilbert has put up a riveting account of a run-in with airline security a few days ago.
It's not like most of the accounts of pointless security-theater we've all read. When I see them, I often think: Yeah, I can imagine something like that happening to me.
My reaction in this case was, Actually, I bet that wouldn't happen to me. Not to spoil the surprise, but: Vance Gilbert and I are both middle-aged men over six feet tall, even born in the same city. But I am as you see above, and he is as you see below. And it is impossible not to think that this made the difference.
To spell it out, as he puts it in his note: he was Flying While Black. When we were living in Japan during its boom years, I noticed instantly the way women would grab their purses extra tight when I was coming down the other side of the street at night, or how parents would be extra careful with their children around us. The Japanese people weren't even aware of this involuntary tensing; of course we noticed every flinch. For now I won't go into my whole theory of where and in what circumstances people of different races are made to feel the burden of race -- the pressure of it playing so large a part in your identity. Or how hard it is for white Americans to really imagine that pressure, since to be white in America is in most circumstances to be able to forget about race (your own). I'll just say that the theme comes through very powerfully in Gilbert's account. [And of course in this famous Louis CK bit.]
As a side benefit, as you will see, the story shows how we have essentially criminalized being interested in airplanes. One of the many changes to note in our upcoming 9/11 reflections.
For a sample of Vance Gilbert singing, poignantly in this case, "Citizen of the World," there is a clip at Amazon. Thanks to reader JC in Massachusetts. ALSO: More from Arlington Patch, including this photo, by Jeff Schorfheide, of Gilbert clad as he describes in his post:
It's not like most of the accounts of pointless security-theater we've all read. When I see them, I often think: Yeah, I can imagine something like that happening to me.
My reaction in this case was, Actually, I bet that wouldn't happen to me. Not to spoil the surprise, but: Vance Gilbert and I are both middle-aged men over six feet tall, even born in the same city. But I am as you see above, and he is as you see below. And it is impossible not to think that this made the difference.
To spell it out, as he puts it in his note: he was Flying While Black. When we were living in Japan during its boom years, I noticed instantly the way women would grab their purses extra tight when I was coming down the other side of the street at night, or how parents would be extra careful with their children around us. The Japanese people weren't even aware of this involuntary tensing; of course we noticed every flinch. For now I won't go into my whole theory of where and in what circumstances people of different races are made to feel the burden of race -- the pressure of it playing so large a part in your identity. Or how hard it is for white Americans to really imagine that pressure, since to be white in America is in most circumstances to be able to forget about race (your own). I'll just say that the theme comes through very powerfully in Gilbert's account. [And of course in this famous Louis CK bit.]
As a side benefit, as you will see, the story shows how we have essentially criminalized being interested in airplanes. One of the many changes to note in our upcoming 9/11 reflections.
For a sample of Vance Gilbert singing, poignantly in this case, "Citizen of the World," there is a clip at Amazon. Thanks to reader JC in Massachusetts. ALSO: More from Arlington Patch, including this photo, by Jeff Schorfheide, of Gilbert clad as he describes in his post:
