I was flying from London Heathrow airport on board British Airways after visiting my home country Nigeria to attend to some family issues when I encountered a routine ordeal that I thought I had gotten used to, being a frequent international traveler: racial profiling and discrimination. My final destination was Atlanta, a city I had fallen in love with for its recent diverse, cosmopolitan and multicultural evolution.
As I stood on the line waiting to be boarded at Heathrow, I heard my name along with a few other names announced over the public announcement system requesting us to report to the airline officials. We were all hounded and sequestered in a small secluded area where our hand luggages, electronic devices and body cavities were thoroughly searched, combed through and ravaged without as much as any reasons advanced for the extra scrutiny. I had learnt over the years not to question or argue with security officials, be it at airports or at any instances for that matter, as I have realised how dangerous the world has come to be in the hands of terrorists, be they domestic or international ones. I always take the humiliation that comes with this with an abundance of equanimity and self-possessed calmness. The only protest I exhibit whenever this would happen, is to defiantly remain silent even when the violators of my freedom and dignity ask me silly questions about who and how I packed my bags, or if I had visited Iran or North Korea on my trip. I just simply look away, indicating with a slow snappy nod that they have my bags and my passport in their possession, and what good will any of my answers do to their silly and predetermined questions. My defiant stance and attitude are further justified when I observe that my white co-travelers are not, more often than not, subjected to the same treatment as myself. Those who are pulled aside, searched, harassed and scrutinized are blacks and persons of color who do not fit the profile of “decent and nice” persons.
After frisking my entire body and almost ripping my privates out of its socket and ravaging through my pulley, the security man finding no incriminating materials angrily waved me away. I boarded the aircraft, while feeling the gaze of other travellers and wondering if they thought of me as one lucky terrorist, I began to look forward with trepidation to the humiliation that was awaiting my arrival in Atlanta in the hands of US Immigration and Customs agents.
Our nine-hour flight to Atlanta was smooth and eventful as I had met on board, two of my very good friends. One was a Senator who had studied law at Cambridge University in England and had returned home to Nigeria to begin a career in politics, the other was a brilliant banker, who upon graduating from Harvard, transitioned from working for JPMorgans to become the Managing Director of one of the most successful new generation banks in Africa, with well over 500 branches and over 50,000 staff. My friendship with these two gentlemen has spanned over several years and we were very excited to run into one another. We had turned our spaces in the First-Class cabin into a mini get together zone, enjoying some refreshment and sharing interesting stories about Nigeria and the world. The company we shared made the trip short and bearable.
Our flight arrived to the usual jammed and slow lines on the Immigration floor. I was asked a few routine questions and as usual was flagged for extra scrutiny and search. My friends got the same treatment. As I and my friends huddled by the carousel and conveyor discharging our luggages, I noticed three Customs agents looking and pointing in our direction. I instantly knew that they were making for us. Incidentally, our flight was a full one, and I could confirm to a high level of certainty, that the three of us were the only black persons on board in the First-Class cabin. There may have been very few other non-white passengers on board and we were all singled out for his humiliating ordeal.
Within seconds these agents who were joined by one extra man approach us and formed a circle around us making us feel like animals in a cage and some sort of criminals. Only one of the Customs agents spoke. He spoke to me with forceful authority in such condescending and rude tone of voice, asking me in quick session with rapidity about my trip, what I did for a living, where I lived, why I traveled and if I knew the men I was standing and chatting with and for how long I had known them. As he spoke to me, his mouth was foaming and his forehead was contracting in anger and resentment of our presence on American soil. He reached out and snatched my passport that I was holding in my right hand and began to flip through the pages with careless abandon while interrogating me disrespectfully. All our crime was flying into America with legal rights without having broken any laws or caused any breach of protocol. I was very irritated, but I kept my cool, refusing to be drawn into these unruly men’s arena of naked rudeness and incivility; qualities I believe were unbecoming of persons doning the uniform of the United States of America, and persons feeding fat on the American tax payers sweat, blood and tears. I pitied these men and felt sorry for such a great country that has empowered these men with weapons and brains onto which they were entrusted to protect and defend their citizens and whoever may be in their land.
I was not intimidated by the grandstanding of these agents, as I was sure of my unblemished life and could swear on the integrity and the outstanding status of my friends. Instead, I was repulsed of the rudeness of the agent, and I continued to keep my cool.
I demanded for my passport which he promptly shoved back to me. I asked him why out of a traveling group of well over 300 passengers, they singled us blacks out. He said that it was a random process. I reminded him that if he was conducting a random sampling of all the passengers, he should have considered demographic and race indices as a methodology, as that could have given him a better sample result. I told him that this method, if he did any research in college was the adaptable and acceptable ways and means of conducting proper sampling. In my mind, I knew that none of these agents went past high school education although I did not say so to them.
The agent that spoke to me was infuriated and shot back at me raising his voice and wagging his short stumpy fingers at my face. He started to cuss, telling me that he was tired of listening to this racial profiling bullshit; that he was performing his duty of which he has the right to pull all the blacks from this flight and do whatever pleases him. At this point his fellow agents who were all white joined him in hauling obscenities at us. I was unimpressed as I reminded them that they were racially profiling black and brown people and that the y were disrespecting and disgracing the uniforms and authorities entrusted upon them by the institutions they claim to represent and the country and the people they have sworn to serve and protect.
I asked these agents very calmly:
“TRY BEING BLACK, JUST FOR ONE DAY”
It was very obvious that these agents who were all white, had racially profiled us and other black passengers and that it was endemically systemic and an institutionalized process, because when I stood my ground and reminded these agents that the remaining hundreds of white passengers that t hey chose not to interrogate may have been fascist terrorists, domestic racist killers of black churchgoers and drug traffickers, he looked embarrassed ignoring me with his face flushing with anger at my impetus to question his authority and at my indirect implication that he and his colleagues were racists cloaked in uniforms.
I had encountered and endured various forms of racism and social profiling in the hands of white Americans. I can recall hundreds of instances that made me to question the humanness of people, especially those that are expected to know better, and those who claim to be educated and civilized. I am even more shocked and disappointed by the racism of those who claim and hold up to the tenets of the statutes of liberty and freedom while clutching the bible and professing to carry the mantle and doctrine of Jesus Christ on their heads.
As serious as most of these racial profiling and racism are, they sometimes provide some comical relief as the stupidity and ignorance of the white perpetrators inextricably make them subhuman and ingloriously diminished in my eyes and in those of other discerning human beings. I recall a very recent event whereby four men including myself were gathered around the front desk of our condominium trying to get some service from the concierge, when a white elderly couple entered the building. The husband took a glance at us men, with me being the only black there, and aggressively tossed his car keys at me, rudely commanding me to park his old Ford vehicle. I grabbed the key midair and flung it hard at him without uttering a word. He stared at me like a hound dog about to attack a thief and asked me if I was not the valet. I let the concierge respond to this racist, telling him that I was waiting to pick up my car too and pointing out to him through the glass door my car which I believe may have been able to purchase 20 of his Ford. The concierge further informed him that standing next to me, was the valet. The man and his silicon enhanced wife offered me no apologies, but stared me down some more and from their looks must have been worried about how I managed to have escaped from the cotton plantation working for no wages and driving a decent car. They stormed off in anger and what I had thought and imagined should have been in disgrace.
I once entered a Hermes duty-free shop in one of the international airports in Europe with my wife who was looking to purchase a scarf for one of our daughters whose birthday was coming up. There was a white American couple who were also shopping. The man was seated in the middle of the store straddling in between his legs, all their luggages and keeping watchful eyes over them. As soon as we entered the shop, the man’s boisterous and loud wife took a look at us and shouted over the shoulder to her husband saying: “honey, watch over my bags”. I felt a surge of disgust come over me, as we were the only ones in the shop. I turned to my wife, who had a wry smile on her face, and with that smile she urged me to ignore the ignorant woman. Ironically, my wife was clutching her Hermes Berkin bag that I had given her on her 50th birthday. We looked at the white American couple with pity and we were not going to allow them spoil our European holidays during which we had not experienced any forms of discriminations or reproach based on the color of our skin.
I felt a rush of pity for this ignorant and rude couple whose only claim to fame and power over people who look different, was their soiled white color, their blemished dirty attitude and their false sense of warped and jaded superiority complex and idiocy.
Life in the “home of the free and the brave” has not been that free for the dark- skinned ones, and the bravery may have been for the conquest of the dark, the weak and the poor. How then can one explain the ever-widening gap between the rich and the poor in America? How can we justify the high number of unemployed young black graduates roaming the streets in search of the ever- elusive job? That my daughter attended one of the best universities in the world and graduated from one of the best Law Schools, but had difficulties in securing a befitting job while her white counterparts were choosing and picking where to work is disturbing. The jail houses are bursting in their seams in filling up and incarcerating black and brown people without any corresponding correctional and reform plans and agenda for inmates, nor education plans and job creation and opportunity plans for the soon to become inmates who are breeding in the incubator of racist neglect and dismemberment. How many black and latino kids have died in the hands of racist police officers and would the society continue to build more prisons until the whole land is converted to detention centers, or embrace the alternatives of incorporating blacks and other minorities into the social and economic stream of the society for equal education and opportunities?
The dilemma of these societal ills, is the lack of empathy from the majority of the beneficiaries of these discriminatory practices against blacks and other minorities and their tacit participation in these deplorable acts. Where are the Christian white America? They have been largely complicit in these matters with their support of extreme political positions that jeopardize the wellbeing of the poor and minorities who are mostly black.
These practices by white evangelicals or Christians have dated back to slavery days. The Bible was a tool in the hands of the Christian slave owners who manipulated the good book to commit the gravest crime against humanity in the history of the world.
That black people all over the world, have, to a large extent, forgiven the children and descendants of these white slave owners, is remarkable, but to keep absorbing a continued and sustained discrimination in the hands of the descendants of these murderous slave owners and criminals is astonishing and bewildering to say the least. I had come across a slave bible in the Washington Museum of The Bible where major sections of the Holy Book were expunged, redacted and removed by the slave masters in their attempt to mask the parts in the bible that prohibited slavery and abhorred man’s inhumanity to man. The “Christians” who edited and corrupted this bible, produced it for the sole purpose of enforcing obedience and submission of the slaves. They excluded passages like Galatians 3:28 in which it was passionately preached that; “There is neither Jew or Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male or female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus”, because they feared it could possibly incite rebellion. They retained and forcefully preached and propagated passages like Ephesians 6:5; “Servants, be obedient to them that are your masters according to the flesh, with fear and trembling, in singleness of your heart, as unto Christ”. Today, these Christians are still alive and perpetrating these heinous acts under more cloned and sophisticated methods.
My family and I are members of a large Church fellowship in our area. We have been members of this church for several years and are endeared to its congregation because of the outreach and philanthropy projects the Pastor and the members have, over the years, carried out in the Third World. This church which is one of the most beautifully designed and built worship places that I have seen, is made up mostly by white worshipers who make up about 99 percent of the congregation. I have mostly felt uncomfortable at this church, despite my wife’s insistence that God knows no color and that our fellow congregationists love and cherish our presence every Sunday. My children, especially the younger ones love going to the Sunday School, and we have grown very fond of the Pastor and his family whose commitment to preaching and practicing the gospel is in no doubt to us. However, every Sunday, when I leave that beautiful church after listening to very powerful and compassionate words and teachings of Jesus Christ, I feel certain emptiness in the realization that members of this congregation have not been able to change the injustices of racism and racial discriminations around them. This makes me very numb and paralyses my strength, shaking my belief and faith; foundations that I have built and nurtured for so many years.
Then, you watch and listen to Christian Evangelicals who vociferously support politicians who inflict pain and hardship on the citizens they are supposed to defend and protect and wonder the hyporcricy. How do they justify their support of politicians whose daily utterances and actions are filled with hate and disdain for people who do not look or act like them? How come these followers of Christ care less for children of immigrants and the poor than they care for their dogs? Do they ever read and comprehend the real Bible and even attempt to practice what Jesus Christ preached and died for? Or are they simply using the Bible again as their ancestors did in the past; as a tool to advance their personal political and economic goals and agenda in the most debased and shameful self- aggrandisement and grandiloquent deceit that are the hallmark of social and economic degradation and discrimination against black and brown people.
It is cognitively obvious that issues of race and the gripping effects of America’s original sin: racism, as manifested frequently in job and housing discrimination, mass incarceration and the ever-rising resurgence of white nationalism, have risen in dimensions not seen in recent times. The assignment by this country of debasement, denigration and wanton disadvantages on the basis of race and color of skin, has drained the small modicum of humanity it prides itself with.
Many historians have written and espoused the fact that America’s democracy, was falsely written on shaky and uneven ideals, and that Black Americans have fought to make the founding ideals of this democracy true and flourishing. Recognising the vast contribution of black people to the world economy through the huge material wealth created through slavery and bondage, must never distract us from their contribution to freedom and democracy in America and by extension to the entire world. It was only through the bloody struggles of blacks in America, through the Caribbeans and South Africa that shaped the forms of democracy being enjoyed today, despite its present limitations for liberty and freedom.
Whenever I think of the racial injustices black America has suffered in the hands of their white fellow citizens, one of the most painful and pitiable, is the shameful ways by which millions of black families lost their farms to white America. It is on record that through tactical and wicked means, 98% of black landowners in the South, and particularly in the Delta belt, have lost the deed of title of lands belonging to black farmers to white racists. It is stated that well over 12 million acres of farm land, in the last century have been stolen from blacks who through the periods of Emancipation and the Great Depression, with their blood and sweat, legally acquired these farm lands. These dastardly acts of economic theft by white people is not ancient history, as some of these, took place in the last 50 years through vicious war of attrition by white landgrabbers.
To not see these patterns of criminal racist actions as not part of the legacy of white America’s structured wealth gains, is to be blind to how this country rose on the labor of enslaved Africans who worked on land wrested from Native Americans and made it productive, but were deprived of their rightful ownership of some part of their labor. Through institutionalised racist policies spearheaded by conservative white politicians, programs were designed using the USDA and other agencies of government to deprive black farmers of loans and decent opportunities that were granted to their white counterparts. This caused massive loss of farms and wealth from black to white farmers. Institutional and private lenders teamed up to force black farmers into massive bankruptcies and foreclosures with the inevitable beneficiaries being the white farmers and their buddies in the tax and lending institutions.
It is very strongly believed that the economic effects of the theft of black farmlands is the most devastating consideration in the life of Black America. This is estimated to have cost Black Americans to loose hundreds of billions, if not trillions of dollars of black wealth, and may have also cost them tremendous political power and influence, that could have reduced the huge wealth gap between white and black families today.
For those who do not understand the gravity of, and the enormous burden of being black in any era and in any continents of the world I suggests that they should “try being black for just one day”. To be black is to be indelibly and perpetually tarred and exhausted by racial hate and to be virtually drained and wasted in the continuous and frequent need and pressured requirement to prove, define and defend your own humanity and existence as a person and not an animal in the face of hurtful scorn and indignation inflicted on you on a minute-by-minute basis everyday.
Patriotism is the love of your country and you cannot love your country if you do not love your fellow country men and women regardless of their race or color. You cannot MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN when you hate and dispise some Americans, be they from Kenya, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Germany, Mexico or Korea. Afterall, everyone except the original owners of the land, the Native Indians, came from somewhere one way or another.
For those white nationalists and racists encouraged by their politician sponsors and enablers who ask their fellow Americans to go back to where they came from, someone should help them excavate their ancestors’ skeletons and have them accompany them to Germany or somewhere in Europe or wherever they must have invaded America from.
In all societies of the world, there are all types and ranges of people. There are good and bad white and black people. For those who are using their positions in society to oppress and discriminate against people who do not look like them, they must be reminded that their actions and behaviour guided by considerations of expedient wickedness and self-aggrandizement are not only detestable but incompatible with life in any civil society.
Philosophically, there must be an unconditional moral foundation for liberty and equality by enlightening all persons of their rights to be respected as human beings and that mankind must be honoured and not be subjected to vulgar and inhuman treatment meted out to black an d brown people in America in total recognition that the primacy of uprightness entails the equal worth of all persons.
Dr. Okey Anueyiagu
Is the author of the bestselling book;
Biafra: The Horrors of War, The Story of a Child Soldier.
