Sunlight is the best disinfectant and introducing feedback loops to stop bad behavior is crucial so we have launched a new website (with iOS and Android apps coming soon) called AirportAbuse.com – it allows any traveler to easily report abuse they face at airports. Our hope is to shed light on all the abuse BIPOC (black, indigenous, and other people of color) face when they travel and hope to get bad actors famous for their misbehavior.
As the holiday season draws to its close and people slowly stir from their slumber back into your workstations, we come face to face with a particular holiday behemoth: airports. During a Christmas get-together, where many of my friends of different ages, backgrounds and ethnicities had come together, we got to talking about our long way back home.
While all my BIPOC friends were sharing jokes about TSA “random” inspections, I noticed while my white friends laughed along, they were noticeably aghast. They found these encounters to be highly unusual and almost unbelievable. As BIPOC, we have almost come to expect this kid of treatment when we arrive at airports, and I mean any airport. Our white friends talk about impromptu travel plans, holidays on a whim, visa on arrival, fast track queues whereas BIPOC people have to spend months of proving their worthiness to be accepted as a visitor in a country, assure them repeatedly of financial competence and all this to get a foot in the door. Their visas may still be rejected. Airports are simply another tool of oppression in the modern age. People are aware of it enough that it was joked about on Family Guy and yet no measure has been taken to make travel a bit bearable if not easier for all people of color.
From “random checks”, pat downs, various micro-aggressions including comments about appearance, social status, monetary status, traveling is a terrifying experience as a person of color. Airports not only add to that but are major flood points where we have to worry for our safety, how we are treated, whether we are respected or whether we will be another victim of the concord colonists. Although so many people of color have stories of being treated terribly by airport staff, there is no requital and no sense of accountability. If they don’t even see it as wrong to treat us this way, why would they punish their employees for it or worse, apologize? These agents of oppression dole out the doses of humiliation and indignity to the POC like candy and at the end of an 8 hour flight, we are sitting ducks. It’s time we start a conversation about how horribly we’ve been treated. As BIPOC, we are no stranger to blaming ourselves; we blame ourselves when these encounters happen and we keep it a shameful secret. But I promise you, every BIPOC has gone through this and every non-BIPOC needs to hear that their ease of experience may not be shared by everyone. When we have a seat at the table, we must start to talk.
Sunlight is the best disinfectant and introducing feedback loops to stop bad behavior is crucial so we have launched a new website (with iOS and Android apps coming soon) called AirportAbuse.com – it allows any traveler to easily report abuse they face at airports. Our hope is to shed light on all the abuse BIPOC (black, indigenous, and other people of color) face when they travel and hope to get bad actors famous for their misbehavior.