how islamophobia and racism overlap.
Toni Nealie: A German immigration officer calls me out of line. My boys are buoyed along by the stream of disembarking passengers ahead of me. She motions me into a cubicle. “But wait, my boys… Boys! Boys! Wait! Wait!” They turn, alarmed, brows lifted, mouths ajar, the little one clutching for his brother. “My boys, my boys, please…” but she has her wand at the ready, intruding, invading. My limits are breached for the third time this trip. I stiffen, but there is no point in resistance. I have been racially profiled, I assume. My tawny skin could be, what, Palestinian, Afghani, Pakistani, Iraqi? Enemy-colored, regardless of my New Zealand passport.
[…] Being viewed as a potential threat diminishes you, fractures a personal landscape, peels off pieces of bark until you are raw. You begin to suspect your own legitimacy, your place in the long, snaking lines of mainly brown people waiting for their numbers to come up. Are you trying to sneak through a keyhole into a society that doesn’t want you? are you in the shadows of illegality? could they deport you? could they separate you from your children? could they make you disappear?
More here.