It's time for some ethnic profiling.
A few weeks ago, my mother and father returned to Southern California after a long stay in their native Pakistan. Spotting me outside LAX's international terminal, my mother rushed up to hug me when she noticed something different about me: a goatee. "Get rid of that!" she said with typical maternal sensitivity that knows no geographical or cultural bounds. I responded, "But, Mom, I like it. Kinda makes me look dangerous!" She groaned, "Yes. You'll never get on an airplane again."
I laughed, but then wondered whether she had a point, especially since I'd soon be visiting my baby niece in Michigan. When the day arrived for my flight to Detroit, I showed up at Los Angeles International Airport wearing an Old Navy flag shirt and would have happily sported an "I carry no weapons" baseball cap if such an item were manufactured. To my surprise, I sailed through. Maybe I can't get arrested in this town, or in my destination city, or in connecting cities. At the check-in desks and six different checkpoints, no one batted an eye at me.
Relief soon turned to irritation. Here, after all, was a youngish South Asian male traveling alone. My driver's license could easily have belonged to another person, revealing as it did a clean-shaven person with (lamentably) a fuller head of hair than the man standing before them. By giving me an easy ride through security, the airport staff was making me--and every other traveler--much less safe.
I recalled the last time I had facial hair, a dozen years ago, during which time I traveled to Pakistan. Security staff in L.A. and London sped me along, but their counterparts in Islamabad were relentless and overbearingly cautious in ensuring that the guy with the beard was the same fellow as the unbearded person pictured in my passport. I almost didn't make my flight back to L.A. because the Pakistani police were so intent on stopping anyone trying to get to the United States illegally.
Why the difference in approach? The American and British security personnel may have overlooked me because we "all look the same." But more likely, the Pakistani personnel were less squeamish about ethnically profiling one of their own.
Racial and ethnic profiling can be repugnant. But they also represent a sensible aspect of human logic, tied to what social psychologists would consider a normal cognitive process called "sampling bias." Some groups should be watched in certain benign ways.
