The immigration officer held out his hand for my passport. He was large and red-faced, with graying hair and not much neck. Behind him lay a crumpled Dunkin’ Donuts bag. He emitted a suburban sort of provincialism, and yet he sat magisterially in his high chair, wielding his stamp like a scepter. At that moment, his power over my fate was great enough to override even certain constitutional provisos, entitled by the widening exceptionalism of national security.
As the officer flipped through my passport with squinted eyes, I tried to assume an expression of casual innocence, knowing that my complexion and beard merged to form a blueprint of untrustworthiness.
I was 20 years old, and I wanted to get the performance over with—and for it to remain within the parameters of theater. Immigration officers around the world wore the armor of aloofness, but only when reentering the United States would I be made to feel menacing. Only at JFK would I be routinely marched off to interrogation rooms, where I’d wait for hours more before being permitted to plead my innocuousness to one of the nation’s gatekeepers.
“Why so many Arab stamps?” he asked.
“Oh, I grew up in the Middle East. Lots of regional travel for high school tournaments, you know,” I answered, attempting the twang of American camaraderie even as he held in his hands the fullest evidence of my internationalism.
The officer flipped some more, shaking his head. “Why would someone your age travel so much? To those countries?”
He told me he wasn’t convinced I was a student at Bard College—that he found me suspicious. If he had his way, he’d turn me away. He’d send me back to “my country.” But, he admitted after clicking away at his computer, since there were no red flags in the system, he was obligated to let me through. As I reached for my passport, he held on to it for a moment. “Remember,” he said, looking me in the eyes, “America is watching you.”
Four years later, Edward Snowden would supply documentation that proved the officer’s parting words to be perfectly true. But even on that midwinter morning in 2009, on the eve of President Obama’s first inauguration, traveling while brown and bearded had long-aroused cartoonish fears of detonation devices with red and yellow wires wedged deep inside some bodily crevice. To look like a billion men was to look like 19 hijackers, not the other way around.
Before 9/11, boarding a plane was something like boarding a train, with the lone additional step of a rickety metal detector designed to intercept hand grenades and AR-15s. Then, in November 2001, George W. Bush signed the Transportation Security Administration into existence, first as a part of the Department of Transportation and later as the travel security arm of the Department of Homeland Security. As further ignitable plots were uncovered in shoes, underwear, and extra-large soda bottles, air travel in the 2000s became prefixed by hour-long shuffles through highly unsexy carceral burlesque shows. Even as healthcare was being further privatized, education further standardized, and American soldiers sent off to needlessly forfeit lives and limbs, there seemed to be no greater conception of horror for ordinary Americans than another airborne attack. Our government and a phalanx of special-interest groups capitalized on this collective neurosis: the War on Terror unfolded as an age when “security” reigned as the most luxuriant of shibboleths. Uttered by Pentagon officials during committee hearings and press conferences, the malleable watchword doubled the defense budget and eventually justified spending more than $1 trillion on terrorism prevention measures within the United States.
Among such measures was the TSA program “Screen Passengers by Observation Techniques,” or SPOT, in which officers eyed travelers for apparently ominous indicators such as yawning, whistling, running late, appearing not to understand questions, or rubbing their hands together. The officers were granted wide-ranging discretion: In addition to facing extemporaneous detentions, unlucky passengers could be tailed through shops and bathrooms long after they’d passed through security. At the fore of these pattering hands, roving probes, and suspenseful waits were travelers who appeared to have genealogical ties to the Muslim world.
Two years before my trip back to Bard, my father and I flew from the United Arab Emirates to the United States to tour colleges for the first time. When he saw me at the airport—we’d arrived separately—he raised his eyebrows.
“You didn’t shave?”
“Come on,” I said. “You can’t be serious.”
“Well, if you’re detained, I’m not waiting for you at immigration. I’ll come pick you up after you’ve been tortured.”
He was joking, as fathers do, I thought to myself, but a few hours into our cramped flight I felt my nervousness rise. I asked him again if he was serious. He reminded me what I looked like: young and brown-skinned, with facial fluff.
“But I’m not even Muslim,” I said, panicking. “Our last name is Punjabi!”
My father, always clean-shaven, reminded me of the Sikhs across the US who’d been mistaken for Muslims and threatened, assaulted, and murdered in the months after 9/11. Looking into my stricken face, he reached upward and pressed the service button. Moments later, he was asking a stewardess for a disposable razor and travel-size tube of shaving cream.
Near the end of Obama’s first term, a Sikh civil rights group launched an app called FlyRights in protest of the disproportionately high levels of secondary security screenings borne by the turbanned and bearded. The app enabled passengers to file reports of discrimination directly to the TSA. In response, the agency vowed: “We do not profile based on race; we do not profile based on ethnicity; we do not profile based on religion.” This, it turned out, was a lie. Later that year, The New York Times published an investigation into SPOT in which TSA officers at Boston’s Logan International Airport anonymously chronicled their fellow officers’ regularly singling out passengers on unsavory grounds. The whistleblowers estimated that minorities accounted for 80 percent of travelers who were searched during certain shifts. “The behavior detection program is no longer a behavior-based program, but it is a racial profiling program,” one officer told the Times. According to another: “They just pull aside anyone who they don’t like the way they look.”
In 2015, the ACLU successfully sued the TSA for internal records pertaining to SPOT’s scientific credibility. In lieu of sound or coherent methodologies, the ACLU discovered training guides and documents that at least partially explained TSA officers’ untroubled consciences as they pulled ominous-looking Easterners out of line and demanded to know whether they loved or hated America. While SPOT’s official markers weren’t ethnicity-specific, it turned out that the TSA had circulated a fair amount of supplementary material explicitly delineating the enemy, even as the agency retained additional documentation conceding that there was little evidence such pinpointing was effective.
One training presentation in the TSA’s possession, though its use remains unclear, was a tricky multiple-choice “Profile Pre-Test” commissioned by the Long Beach Police Department in 2005. The ostensibly correct answer to all 10 questions—e.g., “In 1968, Bobby Kennedy was shot by…” and “In the 1980s, Americans were kidnapped in Lebanon by…”—turns out to be the same one: Option D, “Male Muslim extremist(s) mostly between the ages of 17 and 40.” (As it happens, Kennedy’s assassin is not and never was Muslim.)
After bombing the (mostly bearded) Taliban out of Kabul, President Bush routinely hailed the supposedly happier and freer women of Afghanistan. What he didn’t say is that Muslim women were less than welcome in the US, where they’d joined Muslim men as a suspect class. In a training presentation titled “Femme Fatale: Female Suicide Bombers,” authored in 2006 by the TSA, affixed with the seal of the Department of Homeland Security, and later released to the public by the ACLU, one slide features a cartoon of a hijabi mother and daughter arguing over a suicide bomber Barbie doll.
“Mommy! Pleeeez!!” the daughter cries, her eyes bulging. “I need this ‘Suicide Bomber Martyr Barbie’! She’s got ‘Glitter Blast Action!’”
“Yeesh!” the mother replies, her hand on her forehead. “You have six already! Praise Allah…”
Broadly speaking, only about half the Islamic insurgents who attacked Western interests between 1980 and 2000 wore beards. Still, by 9/11, the motif was dubitable enough that not a single hijacker was fully bearded at the time of the attacks. While the Americas were settled mostly by scruffy adventurers in the 15th and 16th centuries, the custom of facial hair in American life ebbed and flowed depending on varying ideals of hygiene and religious conservatism. By the end of the 20th century, the state of Massachusetts and even the US Supreme Court had sided with employers that mandated clean-shaven faces in the workplace. Around the same time, reactionary political Islam was making newspaper headlines, thanks in no small part to American and British policies that were ravaging Arab lands.
Rifts between “us” and “them” are best sown through imagery, and the Koranic custom of fist-length beards—a way of honoring Allah’s creations, as the Prophet Muhammad did—was a vivid place to start. Compared with the baggy, demonstrably unpious Western clothing of the 1990s—replete with wallet chains shackling even skater boys to their capitalist treasure—robes, keffiyehs, and thick beards were easy devices with which to other the Arab, who appeared incomprehensible (if not altogether backward) to many Westerners. The divide was vigorously mined by media companies selling fear, defense contractors selling arms, and diabolical statesmen like Dick Cheney for whom the political could only ever be profitable.
As those of us caught in the cultural crosswinds of the 2000s became less sure what to do with our beards, the TSA was forthright. A training guide published in 2005 warned agents: “A male with a fresh shave and lighter skin on his face may be a religious Muslim zealot who has just shaved his beard so as not to attract attention, and to blend in better with other people in the vicinity.” Alas—we were damned if we shaved, damned if we didn’t.
When I was in my mid-20s, I flew back to New York one autumn day after a months-long stay in northern India. I’d retreated to a small Himalayan village to write, read, and philosophize after covering the 2012 presidential elections as an editor at a national cable news network. Young, reckless, and tired of manufacturing platitudes about freedom and democracy in America, I ran out my savings scribbling idealistic tracts at a roughly-hewn desk near my window and wandering through the valley with a stick in hand to ward off roving leopards. By the end of this Thus Spoke Zarathustra era, my hair and beard had grown well into lush hippie verdure.
When I arrived at JFK, the immigration officer promptly sent me to a back room, where I settled into a plastic chair and watched as officers loudly asked mostly brown travelers what they’d been doing in Algiers, Almaty, or Karachi, and whether they’d had any military training or ties to religious organizations. When a trembling detainee couldn’t understand the questions, the officer would merely repeat them more loudly, appalled at the incomer’s bumbling grasp of a non-native language.
After an hour, it was my turn. I put on my strongest American accent and garnished my sentences with big (but not too big) words—“sabbatical,” “authorship,” “expedition” —to denote my emancipation from the moil of insurgent machinations. I effeminized my voice to boot, answering the officer’s questions with a thin, cantillating lightness. (Despite the prospect of a combustible phallus lodged deep up some bodily crevice, it seemed there couldn’t possibly be a gay terrorist.) Smiling, he told me I looked like Jesus and sent me on my way.
If these tête-à-têtes with airport officers felt like performances, it’s because they were spotlit, sundered from ordinary life, from sincerity: Surely there’s more than one way to be American, to exist within a nation, and when left to my own devices—my friends, my brightly painted Harlem apartment, my thoughts—I could choose a way that seemed honorable, or at least clear-minded. I could openly distinguish between the denizen and the oligarch, between cooperative civics and self-defeating jingoism, between people bombed into desperation and a military beholden to its bombmakers. But during tests of political loyalty, those oldest vignettes in the book, at least one party would always be consciously playacting.
Face to face with an officer, I had no choice but to submit to his binary thinking. I couldn’t complicate his premises by telling him I feared that declarations of allegiance only solicited abetments of violence. Or that terrorism was the perennial recourse of people terrorized by institutions. My best bet might have been to lay out our impasse in practical, capitalistic terms: “Sure,” I might say, “those bewhiskered zealots are pesky as hell, but your tactics don’t work.” As proof, I could hand him the leaked DHS memo from 2016 disclosing that the TSA failed to intercept weapons and other contraband in 95 percent of test cases. Or I could dig up the TSA’s own data indicating that the bulk of firearms intercepted at US airport checkpoints belong to travelers passing through the American South, where gun owners are much more likely to be white than Asian. If I were willing to risk a trip to a US naval base in Cuba, I might even point to the fact that Americans after 2001 were more likely to be killed by falling televisions or by children accidentally wielding guns than by terrorism—and that the vast majority of terrorist attacks in this country have been committed by non-Muslims anyway.
Since 9/11, roughly 150 Americans have been killed in Muslim-linked terrorist attacks within the US. In the same timeframe, hundreds of thousands of Americans have been murdered by domestic gun violence, taken their own lives, overdosed on opioids, or died because health insurance companies turned a cold shoulder. Considering this, the TSA’s sumptuous spending of taxpayer dollars begins to look quite a bit like the credo of the military-industrial complex as a whole: win less, spend more, and pray daily for a spasmodic incident that keeps sending oxygen to those shibboleths on life support.
The 13,000 documents made public by the ACLU in 2017 revealed that the TSA conducted its own internal investigation after the Times’ report on Logan Airport. The agency found that there had indeed been some feverishly chauvinistic practices at airports in Newark, Miami, Chicago, and Honolulu. One behavior detection officer, for instance, submitted an anonymous complaint about his manager referring to turbaned passengers as “towel heads.” The DHS subsequently decreed a series of reforms, one of which directed TSA employees to no longer preoccupy themselves too fanatically with specters of Islamic terrorists. “Training documents will state the anti-discrimination point clearly,” a memo read, “and will demonstrate its importance by avoiding the currently exclusive focus on examples on Arab/Muslim terrorists.” Soon, references to Muslim zealots, Islamic extremists, and suicide bomber Barbie dolls disappeared from the TSA’s literature. SPOT was renamed the “Behavior Detection Visual Search Task Analysis Project,” presumably in hopes that a sheer preponderance of consonants might preempt any villainizing acronyms.
Nevertheless, nearly 25 years after the attacks that formalized the stereotype, I still find myself having to step aside for extra prodding every time I fly with a beard. At smaller airports, this often means standing with my legs spread apart as I’m frisked in full view of framed “Remember 9/11” posters and elderly couples who avert their eyes as they pass by, less embarrassed on my behalf than recoiling from the alien in their midst.
Last summer, on my way to New York from Toronto, I was stopped for what the security officer told me was a random check. Around the same time in the US, anonymous government henchmen were picking college students with Muslim-sounding names off the streets because they’d protested Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
“Are you sure it’s random?” I asked, emboldened by Canada’s less formidable aura of national security.
Abashed, the officer insisted his checks were perfectly indiscriminate, and as I proceeded to the X-ray machines, I saw him summon a white man in his 50s behind me.
Since the TSA doesn’t officially collect data on the ethnicity of passengers it pulls aside, anecdotal evidence is all we have to go by. A number of South Asian and Arab men in New York City whom I spoke to over the past few months told me stories about how they still compulsively shave before flights and show up to airports with hours to spare. One of them, whose Muslim name is about as common as “Richard Johnson,” was flagged in the DHS’s system in the early 2000s because he shared his name with an alleged terrorist, resulting in additional stops, delays, and interrogations for the next decade. In my conversations, I came to realize that most of us had been strip-searched at least once and targeted even as scarcely stubbled teenagers.
These days, TSA agents are politer than they were during the War on Terror era. They conduct extra checks almost apologetically, as if tacitly acknowledging their parodic shortcuts to preempting “threats.” Meanwhile, the symbolism of being brown and bearded has grown risibly paradoxical. To be Indian in America today, as I am, is to be more integrated (and thus less exotic) than ever before. Politically speaking, Indian Americans populate the security-loving right even more than they do the left: FBI Director Kash Patel, second lady Usha Vance, former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, 2024 GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, and former Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal all are ethnically Indian. On the left, of course, is Zohran Mamdani, the brown, bearded, Muslim mayor-elect of the very same city that popularized Islamophobic profiling when Mamdani was in elementary school.
This has made for a strange situation, in which the people whom security officials continue to find outwardly menacing look exactly like some of the people leading our city, state, and federal governments. Put another way: Today, the bearded brown man can signify a Wahabist just as easily as he could be the director of the FBI or the mayor of the largest city in America.
Mamdani will be the first bearded mayor of New York City since 1913, as The New York Times, months late to the bandwagon, noted in its post-election media blitz. This hairy likelihood was not lost on his opponents. When Mamdani was a candidate in New York City’s Democratic mayoral primary, a pro-Cuomo super PAC drafted a mailer that quickly caught the attention of both campaigns. This wasn’t because the flyer charged that Mamdani “rejects Israel” and “rejects Jewish rights,” calumnies that by then were hackneyed and predictable. Rather, it was because it featured a doctored photograph in which his beard was made to look darker, longer, and more… Islamic. Another pro-Cuomo super PAC, this one funded in part by Mike Bloomberg, released an attack ad days before the general election that pictured Mamdani in front of the burning Twin Towers. In such moments, Islamophobia’s suffix—“phobia”—applied more literally than ever to the transmogrification of a broad, eclectic swath of humanity into a singularly frightening threat.
On October 24, the soon-to-be-mayor finally broke. Standing outside the Bronx’s Islamic Cultural Center, he directly addressed the ease with which the ascription of Islam persists as a casually wielded derogation in the US, home to 5 million Muslims. Many of them remember the years when Obama was derided as “Muslim,” his unusual name seized upon by exponents of an enduringly Anglo-Saxon America. The claim was false, but it was another way of saying he was inherently unqualified to be president. “Growing up in the shadow of 9/11, I have known what it means to live with an undercurrent of suspicion in this city,” Mamdani said that day. “I will always remember the disdain that I faced, the way my name could immediately become ‘Mohammad,’ and how I could return to my city only to be asked in a double-mirrored room at the airport if I had any plan on attacking it.”
For his own unwavering objections to Israel’s vicious campaign of slaughter and displacement, Mamdani was called “a full-blown jihadist” by Elise Stefanik, the screechy congresswoman known for doing all in her power to insulate Israel from criticism. Representative Laura Gillen wrote: “Pro-Hamas Zohran is unfit to hold any office in the United States.” On a radio show, Senator Kristen Gillibrand admonished Mamdani’s (fictitious) “references to global jihad.” And President Trump, reliably, went straight for Mamdani’s passport: “A lot of people are saying he’s here illegally,” he told reporters in July.
Sadly for the nativists, restoring the US to a purist paradise of military interventionism would require also deporting the six in 10 Americans now opposed to Israel’s government. At this moment, there are too many Americans who are skeptical of Orientalist caricatures, too many Americans who look like Mamdani and like me, for Islamophobia to sustain pretexts of national security.
In January, the young man once interrogated, as I was, by government officials who saw him as a threat to his city—a man who in college referred to his beard as “a symbolic middle finger to the sometimes spoken, but oft-accepted, stereotype that pervades America: ‘brown with a beard? Terrorist!’”—will be sworn in as his city’s highest-ranking elected official. Not only has the sun set on the century of King C. Gillette’s safety razor—the once barefaced American psychos of Wall Street having yielded to beards in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building—but the very faces of us and them have grown closer in semblance. And since it’s harder than ever to fashion convincing, trillion-dollar antagonists out of turbans, veils, beards, and frankincense, perhaps it’s time for TSA officers to halt, probe, and grill other, realer enemies: the airline executives who constrict our seats, the defense contractors who plunder our taxes, and the xenophobic public officials who vilify swaths of the proletariat even as tech and finance moguls mangle our economy to death.
While I’m still intimately familiar with the sensation of a security wand caressing my inner thighs, I haven’t been sent to a back room for questioning since 2019, when I became a naturalized American citizen—a happy decision that in no small part hinged upon the absolute freedom to think and write in public. Yet, having written this essay, I find myself wondering what that immigration officer with the Dunkin’ Donuts bag might find on his computer if I were standing before his booth today, now very much in “my country.” Would my public confessions of doubt foredoom any charades of chauvinism? Would the officer’s monochromatic tests of loyalty collapse under the contradictory weight of one free act ridiculing the very apparatus meant to protect it? Or would it all anyhow come back to my face, to those coarse, black bristles, older than Jesus, propagating my cinnamon skin, the abiding insignia of the alien in a nation clinging to its stale, dissonant shibboleths?
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