PROFILES IN CUSTOMS (via The Mother Judd):

The 'Whiteness Checkpoint' (William Craig, January 17, 2005, Boston Globe)

ARRIVING a few minutes late, I told my students about a delay at the Interstate 91 Border Patrol checkpoint in Hartford, 100 miles from the Canada line. "Oh," a twenty-something student asked, "you mean the `Whiteness Checkpoint' ?"

His classmates didn't laugh out loud. They just snickered, appreciating an apparently well-worn joke.

"Excuse me?" I was shocked -- though not by their dead-on assessment of the checkpoint.

When that barrier was first set up in December 2003, ostensibly to fight terrorism, Border Patrol agents stopped every driver to ask, "American citizen?" But long before summer, they started waving white people like me right on through. We've been more or less exempt ever since, regardless of the threat alert's color.

No, what shocked me was my students' cynical yet naive acceptance of injustice. Like me, they knew blacks and Asians who complained of repeated harassment -- but my all-white students accepted the "Whiteness Check" as part of the "war on terror," even as they joked about how easily a real terrorist could detour around the checkpoint.

"So," I asked, "you don't mind racial profiling, as long as you're exempt?"

"Hey," one young lady answered, "it could stop another 9/11."

We had to get on with class, so I didn't reply.

A profiling checkpoint might have stopped Eyyad Ismail.

Posted by Orrin Judd at January 17, 2005 11:00 AM