Like many Americans, I was appalled when I heard about President Donald Trump’s anti-Muslim social media post bullying kindergartners in Minnesota for wearing hijabs.
Since then, many have voiced their support for the 5-year olds, including the popular YouTube educator Ms. Rachel. It might be easy for some to dismiss what the president did, but when hate comes from the highest echelons of government, it trickles down and hurts everyday people — like me and my family.
Noor Zoma
My sister and I recently canceled holiday travel plans after harrowing experiences with airport security. I’d heard friends talk about being profiled at airports and I’d always listened with empathy, but it always felt like someone else’s story.
Until two weeks ago.
What happened that early Wednesday morning changed far more than my travel plans; it changed the way I think about belonging.
At 4 a.m. that day, my only concern was making my flight. After a frenzied ride to the airport, I rushed inside, quietly relieved that I had enrolled in TSA PreCheck, a program that allows eligible travelers to move quickly through security. To get it, you have to complete a background check and identity verification. I assumed after going through that process I would breeze through security. But I was wrong.
“With each question, I felt like a suspect apprehended for an unnamed crime.”
After I placed my bag on the conveyor belt, a TSA officer pulled me aside for secondary screening. And for the next 30 minutes, I sat in a cramped room answering questions about my nationality, my father’s last name and where my parents were born. With each question, I felt like a suspect apprehended for an unnamed crime. The confidence I had in the system gave way to embarrassment, confusion and fear.
In that moment, everything I had heard over the years about racial profiling carried a different weight. I am a Middle Eastern woman in her late 30s with a Middle Eastern name. I could not know why I had been selected, but I could not ignore how it felt.
I’m definitely not alone. The ACLU published a report about TSA profiling passengers. It noted that agents routinely focuse on Arabs, Muslims and Latinos.
These actions are just another consequence of the broader anti-immigrant policies and hateful rhetoric of the Trump administration and its allies. As the Council on American-Islamic Relations has said, such hate “puts a target” on our backs. Just last week, one California report showed a 58% increase in anti-Muslim hate statewide compared to the prior year. And while some of that hate translates into violence, in everyday life it means being looked at with suspicion. It means being on the receiving end of slurs. And it means being stopped at airports when all you’re trying to do is get home.
Days later, as I waited at the airport for my flight home from Oakland, I called my sister to tell her what had happened. I expected sympathy. Instead, she responded with a story of her own. She told me about a recent family vacation with her husband and their three children — 10-year-old daughter and 2-year-old twins. Like me, they had TSA PreCheck. Like me, they believed they had done everything necessary to make the airport experience easier.
“As the officer swabbed the bottles, he asked my sister if there was bomb powder in there.”
While juggling two toddlers, a stroller, diaper bags and carry-on luggage, my sister and her husband were stopped. A TSA officer looked at her husband, who also is of Middle Eastern descent, and instructed the family to completely dismantle their double stroller and unpack their belongings. Among the items were baby bottles. And as the officer swabbed the bottles, he asked my sister if there was bomb powder in there. She could only stare back in disbelief.
As the screening continued, my sister described feeling the eyes of other travelers fixed on her family. Her twins became restless and upset. Her oldest daughter watched anxiously as her parents answered question after question. What should have been an ordinary trip home became a moment filled with uncertainty, embarrassment and fear. In the end, they were allowed to continue. But the emotional weight of the experience remained.
We need to do better as a nation. We need to be able to trust in our leaders and in the systems designed to protect us. But trust cannot flourish if people leave questioning whether they were judged by their actions or by their appearance. The promise of America is not that every experience will be perfect. It is that every person deserves to be treated with equal dignity and respect. But with anti-Muslim hate is coming from the very top, that promise is getting harder and harder to keep.
Noor Zoma is a Public Voices Fellow on Public Health with The OpEd Project and Blue Shield of California Foundation
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