Reading The New York Times this past August, I was drawn to the headline, “With Hair Pat Downs, Complaints Of Racial Bias.” Two African-American women, Timery Shante Nance and Laura Adele, were both stopped by TSA agents this summer.
Ms. Nance was stopped at the security checkpoint in the San Antonio airport; Ms. Adele in the Seattle-Tacoma airport. Though neither woman had set off any alarms, both were stopped and TSA agents felt they needed to pat down their hair—their natural hair.
One might argue that these are isolated incidents. Since we live in a post-9/11 world, for matters of security, we must allow the TSA and its employees to set up procedures that assure that we are all safe. If the TSA deems natural hair on black women as a potential threat to the nation, who is to say it isn’t?
Being a black woman who wears her hair natural, I know that black women’s natural hair can be big and thick, so wound in dark clouds of twists and braids that maybe it looks to an untrained eye as if we are hiding something in our hair. But after clearing metal detectors, what exactly is suspect? What could we be hiding in our hair?
Is the baby Moses asleep in our reedy dreads? Is there a smuggled lorikeet nesting in our braids?
Perhaps our hair itself is suspect. Terrifying. That hair. Unbent by curling irons, untouched by relaxers, straightening combs, flat irons. Our natural hair has the profile of a potential terrorist and has made it onto the “Do Search” list.
The “Do Search” list isn’t new. It existed pre-9/11. I know because I was on it when I began flying au naturale.
Two years before then, I was happy to be nappy, flying frequently to promote a novel and children’s books I had published. If you were behind me, you wouldn’t have noticed me, a small dark-skinned black woman with an Eddie Bauer briefcase, a bottle of water, and a head full of natural twists. You wouldn’t have known that I was a one-woman delay. My stop would’ve seen random to you. Except that it wasn’t. Virtually every time I stepped a foot through security, I was pulled aside for additional screening. Like Ms. Nance and Ms. Adele, I passed through the metal detector, my bag made it through the x-ray—then I was pulled aside.
It became frustrating, and more, something that angered me. I began observing that during these checks, I was the only one pulled out of line, or if someone else was, it was because he/she had set off the alarm.
When I told one of my brothers about it, he said, “They probably think you’re a drug courier.”
I laughed at the sheer ridiculousness of the thought. “Me!? I have never done an illegal drug in my life.”
My dark skin & nappy hair twice-monthly flights were adding up to the screeners—not as me being an author, but a drug mule.
When I was in college, I used to get asked by male students of the African Diaspora, where I was from—Jamaica, Haiti, Ethiopia, Cameroon? One young man didn’t believe me when I told him I was from Lackawanna, N.Y., and my parents were from Alabama. My answer angered him. He insisted I was a Jamaican, as was he. Worse, I was a self-hating Jamaican whose family had instructed me to lie about my heritage. That was his theory, and he was sticking to it.
We all are capable of formulating theories, and sticking to them. They don’t have to be based in fact, just our beliefs. In college, I didn’t realize I was the face of the Diaspora, the embodiment of all the women they thought I was, and who I knew I was. I was from Africa, east and west, a sojourner through the islands of the Caribbean, a daughter of the Second Great Migration of African-American from South to North.
Perhaps Chaka said it best—to these young men, I was “every woman.”
To airport security, I was that woman. The one to be stopped and searched. The one who was suspect. A long lost daughter whose lineage crossed through Kush—was I carrying Kush now, perhaps, in my hair?
With a growing intolerance of my “random” searches, I informed my mother that the next time I was stopped, I was going flying au naturale: I would jump on the belt at security and strip. Being a well-raised, Southern woman of a certain age, she said, “Well, you wouldn’t want to do that.”
I didn’t do that; instead, the very next time I flew and was stopped, I confronted the screener who stopped me and asked why I was being stopped.
“Ma’am this is a random check,” he assured me as he swabbed my briefcase.
“No, this isn’t. As a matter of fact, you are the same agent who stopped me the last time I flew.”
“No I wasn’t,” he insisted.
“Yes, you are, and you have stopped me before.” This is when I assured him. “You may check thousands of passengers, and don’t remember them. I remember you, and I want your full name. I’m reporting you.”
He refused to give me his full name, but that didn’t matter. I reported him anyway, wrote a letter of complaint to his employer. I never received a reply.
I was still stopped, searched, and had my bag swabbed. I became stoic, feeling as though I had at least said my piece.
When 9/11 happened, and airport security was raised to code ridiculous, I wondered how much had been missed by screeners leading up to that fateful day. Who had they missed, what had they missed while believing some theory about the threat level of my hair? And now, while the au naturale hair of black women has taken on a new and heightened threat level of its own, who is breezing past them? Unsuspected, un-searched, sleek-haired and dressed to kill.
Connie Porter is the author of the Addy series, a series of historical children's novels from American Girl. Her first novel, All-Bright Court was named in 1991 as a Notable Book by the American Library Association, and by The New York Times as one of its "Best Books." Her essays have appeared in Glamour and Seventeen, and her book reviews in The Boston Globe and The New York Times. She was named regional winner in Granta magazine's 1996 contest for the "Best American Writers Under Forty." Connie Porter’s novel, Imani All Mine, published by Houghton Mifflin in 1999 was named an Honor Book by the Black Caucus of the American Library Association, an Alex Award winner by the Young Adult Services Association of the American Library Association, as well as being chosen as one of the Best Books for Young Adults by the ALA. Book List also picked it as one of Editors’ Choice for Best Books Adults Books For Young Adults. She lives in Las Vegas.