When Laura Adiele arrived at Port of Seattle’s SeaTac Airport on her way to catch a flight to Texas, she had no idea she would become a victim of yet another controversial action by the Transportation Security Administration.
The organization has been making a series of widely questioned decisions regarding the treatment of their passengers as they travel through security. Since the supposed upgrade in airport security after 9/11, many advanced improvements have been implemented, including uncomfortably physical pat-downs and highly-protested full-body scans.
The TSA has come under fire for a number of things recently, including inappropriately patting down a very young child and prohibiting an elderly woman to board her flight until she removed her wet Depends, which they believed they could not properly inspect.
What happened to Adiele was equally questionable in taste.
According to a recent article on CNN, the TSA estimates that “only 3% of passengers are subjected to pat-downs—and then only after they have set off a metal detector or declined to step into a full-body scanner.”
But, that didn’t stop Adiele from having her full, curly hair searched by TSA security, even after undergoing a full-body scan where she did not set off the detector.
In an interview with Seattle’s King 5 News, Adiele felt she was being specifically profiled as a result of her race. This serious claim has prompted many to ask if the incident at the airport was racially motivated, especially considering that a TSA supervisor told her it was protocol to “examine anything that poofs from the body.”
While it is common knowledge that African American hair is naturally curlier and coarser than other races or ethnicities before chemical processing, many women of all colors are the proud owners of very thick heads of curly, kinky hair.
In the King 5 article, Adiele claims that she still “saw plenty of other women with ‘big hair, ponytails’ who weren’t being searched.”
The article continues on to explain that she felt “it was discrimination, that she as a black woman with an Afro tucked up into a curly bun, was being selected for hand-screening when women of other races weren’t.”
With the inauguration of our 44th president Barack Obama, many media outlets, social commentators and political pundits have insisted that his election heralded the emergence of a new way of thinking among the masses. For some, the political acceptance of a black man as commander-in-chief symbolized a national transition into a post-racial United States.
In a 2008 article written shortly after Obama officially took office, The Economist astutely noted that, “Mr. Obama’s candidacy at first seemed a post-racial triumph. While he rarely addressed the issue directly, he seemed to embody the hope that America could transcend its divisions.”
However, with reoccurring incidents like this one where a woman with a certain texture of hair is called out, many doubt that the utopic, post-racial society many thought was inevitable could truly be upon us.
