Racist to the Bone?

By Mekiya Outini

Day thirty of the longest government shutdown in American history found me stranded in La Guardia Airport, en route home from a writers’ retreat that my wife and I had just attended at the easternmost end of Long Island. Heavy rain lashed the tarmac and grayed out the windows. Dozens of planes sat on the runways, going nowhere. The TSA hadn’t been paid in four weeks. Rumor had it that everyone in America was cranky, xenophobic, and out for brown blood, and given that my wife is Moroccan-born, and very precious to me, it was all I could do to stay cool. 

“Don’t go to New York,” we’d been told repeatedly since receiving the invitation. It was not an opportunity we afford to pass up, but those warnings would not stop playing in my head. A few days before our departure, I’d read an article in a national magazine that began, “On April 25, the same day that FBI agents arrested a Wisconsin judge and ICE deported a cancer-stricken four-year-old US citizen to Honduras….” Similarly lurid reports were all over my LinkedIn feed: tales of masked agents prowling the streets of Chicago, emitting the same gander-hiss/tortoise-mating-call mashups that innovative sound engineers once used for the raptors in Jurassic Park and body-slamming immigrant embryos into oblivion. We’d already been through La Guardia once that month, on our way out to Montauk, and there’d been no complications, but ten months of the same relentless messaging had taken a toll on my nervous system. 

My wife, for her part, was unworried. Though she’s brown, and blind, and North African, and indigenous, and a woman, she’s also proud to call America home. By all accounts, she is an asset to this country: talented, productive, and law-abiding. She also has an MA in journalism, and several years of experience in the field, and perhaps not incidentally, she’s intensely skeptical of the mainstream media. 

I’m skeptical, too, but with less kneejerk faith in humanity to bend my skepticism in any particular direction. Tell me that the folks at CNN are hacks, and I’ll believe you, but from that it does not follow necessarily that the people they call hacks are really not so bad. I’m in the see-it-to-believe-it camp. What I really want is proof: definite, quantifiable, and already replicated across at least a dozen controlled longitudinal studies—though, in this age of Follow the Scientism, I’ll settle, if I must, for a well-produced infomercial. 

The messaging that had me in a cold sweat in La Guardia had all the trappings of such an infomercial. So did the messaging with which I’d been bombarded five years earlier, during the COVID-19 pandemic, which had kept me in a cold sweat in the comfort of my own home, where the only things to see—and therefore to believe—were YouTube and the television. The significant difference was that, in 2020, I’d been isolated, six feet and a mile-high sneeze guard away from anyone whose lived experience might’ve given the lie to the corporate media’s fearmongering. 

Looking back, I can’t rightly say there was nothing to fear, but I can say that I was not the one who should’ve been afraid. I was young and healthy—maybe not as healthy as I would’ve been if I’d been part of a robust community, but healthy enough to punt a virus whose natural, immunocompromised, octogenarian prey I was not, any more than my wife is a machete-toting gangbanger from Bogotá; but, still, I had ACE2 receptor cells, she has brown skin, and I was afraid.

Why? 

Fear is useful. Not to me—like most Americans, I have enough on my plate without fear—and not to our fellow travelers, stuck in La Guardia, and not to the officers tasked with enforcing the laws of the land, be they ICE, or the local police, or the TSA. But to the media moguls who stand to profit a little more for every soul who learns to trust the garish warnings splashed across their screens more than the evidence of their own senses, fear is useful indeed. 

What my senses were telling me that night in La Guardia was this: far from cranky, xenophobic, and out for brown blood, everyone in that airport seemed to be doing everything in their power to make the best of a bad situation, to adapt, to show kindness and courtesy, to get where they needed to go without hindering anyone, and, above all, to stay cheerful. 

Maybe it’s true what those talking heads say. Maybe America really is racist to the bone. And maybe that day, in La Guardia—this is Occam’s Razor speaking—everyone simply forgot to be who they were. Maybe the Nazis, the fascists, the KKK goons, catching sight of the brown, blind, indigenous, immigrant woman making her way through security, were all seized, for some mysterious reason, by a novel idea: to let her pass—either for the sake of data collection, per the byzantine terms and conditions of late-stage surveillance capitalism, or else simply out of Übermensch fatigue, for surely even Goebbels needed a nap and a snack now and then. Maybe that’s why they all smiled so sweetly as we dragged ourselves from gate to gate. Maybe that’s why, as we passed through security, one beleaguered agent went out of his way to satisfy her curiosity by explaining how the conveyor belts worked. And as for all those people in the background, all those weary travelers sitting on chairs and benches and lying on the floor, introducing themselves, making small talk, laughing ruefully into phones, reporting to bosses, updating loved ones, fluffing neck pillows, resting aching feet on bags—maybe they were all just extras in a slick, live-action roleplay spat out by corporate America’s post-racial propaganda machine. Not unlike hired protesters. But also not like them. 

Maybe, on that day of delays, misfortunes, disappointments, frustrations, anxieties, and inconveniences great and small, with excuses piling up around us, and accumulated days, and months, and years, and decades of messaging reminding us to hate each other and to distrust ourselves—maybe, spontaneously, on that day of all days, everyone in La Guardia just up and decided to be on their best behavior. For no reason at all.

Such phenomena are always happening, after all, in nations that are sexist, racist, xenophobic, wicked to the bone.