[Marxism] Alfredo Prieto on "Profiling"

[Walter Lippmann <walterlx@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

(Alfredo Prieto is one of the editors of TEMAS,
and also works closely with CAMINOS, the journal
of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Center here in 
Havana, Cuba. He wrote the preface to the Cuban
edition of Zinn's PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED
STATES and is now an editor of GACETA, the journal
of Cuba's Union of Artists and Writers, UNEAC.)
=================================================

HAVANA TIMES 
Profiling

http://www.havanatimes.org/?p=3578

by Alfredo Prieto

The next to last time that I entered the United States was on
September 21, 2001, ten days after the horrible and abominable
terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers of New York. Those attacks had
affected me deeply.

On that day the Miami International Airport had an almost eerie
aspect, considering that as a "natural frontier" between the United
States and Latin America it usually receives and dispatches the
largest number of daily flights from the US to the region.

The basement area where the baggage claim is located was abandoned.
Along with the Continental Airlines charter flight from Havana, there
was only one American Eagle domestic flight arriving and that flight
had arrived half empty, judging by the number of passengers waiting
for their bags to emerge.

Three months later, after a period teaching classes in a
Massachusetts University, I had set out to return to Miami from Logan
Airport in Boston. The security measures had been still further
reinforced and the order to remove your shoes and put them through
the x-ray machine had been added to the normal security proceedings.

After passing through all the security checks with no problems, but
before getting on the plane, an airport official came through the
line separating out some of the passengers. He approached me
courteously, signaled to me and asked me to step out of the line.

At that moment I realized that what all those in my group had in
common was our condition of not being classifiable as "WASPs" [White
Anglo Saxon Protestants]. Almost all of us were Hispanic - deep down,
quite similar to the Arabs - although there were some Asians and two
or three African Americans as well.

With the same courtesy, I asked him if that wasn't an act of racial
profiling. As he had evidently already been advised by his superiors,
he limited himself to shrugging his shoulders and responding
mechanically, "No sir, this is done at random. I apologize for any
inconvenience that it may have caused you."

Although it was all more sound than substance, at that moment I
recalled two recent experiences. The first had taken place in the
exclusive area of Lexington. After having left the house where I was
staying for the weekend and gone outside several times to smoke, the
owner - a famous North American intellectual - had received a
telephone call informing him that there was a Hispanic male of
suspicious aspect standing in the doorway of his house.

The professor from MIT, usually of a caustic humor, told the caller
not to worry, it was only his gardener who was putting in some
overtime hours in order to be able to visit his family in Chiapas.

The second incident was in Tower Records in Cambridge. My friend
Janie, blonde and blue-eyed, was looking through the CDs while I
stood behind her, watching what she picked up in her hands, but
without speaking to her. A clerk came up to her and asked her if I
was bothering her. She thanked him for the gesture but told him that
there was no need to protect her from her husband.

The airport was the third time that I experienced something that a
Cuban sociologist living in Chicago had written about: I am a "white"
when I wake up in Havana, but I am "other" when I journey the thirty
minutes through airspace to Miami, because I am no longer "white". To
exist is to be perceived, stated an English bishop who had the gall
to declare objective reality inexistent - only here, the weight of it
flattened me like an anvil.


=========================================
     WALTER LIPPMANN
     Havana, Cuba
     Editor-in-Chief, CubaNews
     http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CubaNews/
     "Cuba - Un ParaÃso bajo el bloqueo"
=========================================

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