Bollywood Profiling: Flying While Brown

Bollywood actor detained at Newark airport – CNN.com.

Leading Bollywood star Shah Rukh Khan says he was detained by American officials at New Jersey’s Newark International Airport because of his last name.

In an interview with CNN’s sister network in India, CNN-IBN, Khan said immigration officials at the airport detained him for questioning after they said his name was flagged.

“They kept on telling me that my name is common to some name that has popped up on the computer, so they need to follow procedure,” he said. “It took them an hour and a half, two hours; they kept on asking me questions, if I could give them any … numbers in America that they can contact and vouch for me and who I am.”

As a young six-foot-four brown Muslim male who also happens to be a global media ‘talking head’ on international television, suffice it to say that you can rest assured that I could probably write a book-and-a-half on our current airport profiling phenomenon of ‘flying while brown’ since September 11, 2001.

Having said that, I must admit that this recent CNN story about Bollywood film star Shah Rukh Khan elicited a groaned chuckle after reading about his own personal ‘flying while brown’ airline profiling moment @ Newark International Airport in New Jersey.

First of all, for anyone who has ever even heard of Bollywood should know that this recent case would be the moral equivalent of pulling Tom Hanks (or Tom Cruise) from a Hollywood-bound airline flight from Newark.

Yes…That is how famous this dude is in India…

So rest assured, India is laughing at us Americans right about now…

And rightfully so…

Such is the dismal affairs of our American homeland security TSA ‘no-fly’ and ’selectee’ airline watch-lists aimed at keeping our borders safer. After 9/11, the new racial profiling adage on the street has now become ‘flying while brown’.  Along with the entire NSA domestic spying program, these post-9/11 American legal arenas have entered into the bounds of the Orwellian absurd.

For God’s sake, we are flagging famous Indian movie stars as potential terrorists for additional airport scrutiny…

Why is that, you may ask?

Because his last name is Khan…

A South Asian equivalent of ‘Smith’ or ‘Jones’, since our counter-terrorism databases primarily contain Muslim-sounding names like Khan, Ali, Ahmad, Muhammad or Akbar; our government tends to scoop up millions of innocent brown people into their dragnet simply because their names happen to be the Asian equivalents of Smith, Jones, Davis, Johnson or Cheney.

Whereas the primary racial profiling adage of the 80s and 90s was ‘driving while black’; in our post-9/11 millenial civil rights era, a new racial profiling moniker has emerged within our lexicon dealing with the disparate legal treatment of Muslims, Arabs and South Asians since the tragedy of 9/11.

It’s called ‘flying while brown’…And today, the victim was Bollywood movie superstar Shah Rukh Khan.

Tomorrow, the victim could be actor Kal Penn (of Harold and Kumar),  celebrity chef Padma Lakshmi, stand-up comedian Russell Peters, Apu “Kwik-E-Mart” Nahasapeemapetilon or Aasif Mandvi from The Daily Show with Jon Stewart who will be the next random brown person pulled over in an airport line at Logan, O’Hare or Reagan for additional scrutinty simply for ‘flying while brown’ and because they share the same golden brown skin and ominous foreign-sounding names with those of bearded knuckleheads half a world away.

As Americans of color, who now represent lightly more than one-third of the population of the United States — 34 percent — we black/light olive/golden brown Americans have probably been personally exposed or have seen our friends, families and neighbors be the victims of racial profiling in the past.

For that reason, as the torchbearers of the millenial civil rights generation, we Americans of color (who now represent nearly 104 million people) have all come to learn from our respective lives the simple (and sad) fact that it does indeed sometime suck in America to be black while driving, brown while flying and white while….

Well, we’re still waiting on that one…