The Perils of Doing Math While Foreign-Looking

Here's a a charming story:

On Thursday evening, a 40-year-old man — with dark, curly hair, olive skin and an exotic foreign accent — boarded a plane. It was a regional jet making a short, uneventful hop from Philadelphia to nearby Syracuse.

Or so dozens of unsuspecting passengers thought.

The curly-haired man tried to keep to himself, intently if inscrutably scribbling on a notepad he'd brought aboard. His seatmate, a blond-haired, 30-something woman sporting flip-flops and a red tote bag, looked him over. He was wearing navy Diesel jeans and a red Lacoste sweater--a look he would later describe as “simple elegance”--but something about him didn’t seem right to her.

Based on a note the woman passed to the flight attendants, the flight returned to the gate and was delayed for over two hours. Skipping ahead:

And then the big reveal: The woman wasn’t really sick at all! Instead this quick-thinking traveler had Seen Something, and so she had Said Something.

That Something she’d seen had been her seatmate’s cryptic notes, scrawled in a script she didn’t recognize. Maybe it was code, or some foreign lettering, possibly the details of a plot to destroy the dozens of innocent lives aboard American Airlines Flight 3950. She may have felt it her duty to alert the authorities just to be safe. The curly-haired man was, the agent informed him politely, suspected of terrorism.

The curly-haired man laughed.

He laughed because those scribbles weren't Arabic, or some other terrorist code. They were math.

Yes, math. A differential equation, to be exact.

Math phobia and Islamophobia in one story. Goodness!

Seriously though, what could the man possibly have been writing that would have constituted a threat to the forty-one minute flight? How irrationally fearful do you have to be to think sitting next to an olive-skinned man writing things you don't understand constitutes “seeing something”?

At least in this case the man was treated respectfully and was eventually allowed to stay on the flight. That's not always the case. This has become a thing lately: Muslims, or people who look like they might be Muslim, being forced off planes for no reason beyond the irrational fears of their fellow passengers. (See here, here, and here, for example.)

There is a lot of talk these days about “the regressive left.” The term refers to ostensibly progressive people who level charges of Islamophobia at anyone who dares to criticize Islam, as a weapon for stifling critics. These folks often show themselves on college campuses, where they try to shout down contrary voices or blather about “safe spaces,” or decry Israel as the source of all the problems in the Middle East. Jeffrey Taylor in particular has been eloquent in calling out these disgusting people. The regressive left is real, and it is vile.

But Islamophobia is also real, and it is just silly to deny it. By “Islamophobia” I mean an irrational fear of Muslims, and it is trivial to find examples of it on a daily basis. Yes, the regressive left tries to shut down contrary voices with specious accusations, but their critics are often guilty of denying the obvious.

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To be fair, he wasn't just foreign looking. He actually was foreign. Italian, specifically.

By Valhar2000 (not verified) on 08 May 2016 #permalink

Yes, the regressive left tries to shut down contrary voices with specious accusations, but their critics are often guilty of denying the obvious.

Do the critics deny the obvious, or they believe that one of those problems is bigger, is the sense that it harms far many more people, than the other?

Some of the people who deny Islamophobia exists are dogmatist, no doubt, but many who are accused of denying it simply prioritize expelling the regressive elephant from the living room over catching the islamophobic mouse.

By Valhar2000 (not verified) on 08 May 2016 #permalink

Islamophobia harms more people than the occasional regressive lefty.

sean s.

By sean samis (not verified) on 09 May 2016 #permalink

Consider the implication of the writer of the original piece - who is sympathetic to the victim in this case - that "Arabic" can be equated with a "terrorist code." Had this man actually been of Arab ethnicity and been writing in a foreign language, as is one's right, he too would have been taking a later flight, after much more harassment, no matter what degrees he held. I say that with some certainty based on the accounts of dozens of brownish people who have been removed from planes recently for doing nothing at all. The little pants-wetting Fox News viewers who precipitate these incidents are no longer capable of being educated to understand that it is not suspicious to read, write, or converse in a foreign language. The government simply needs to start filing charges against people who disrupt flights by making such accusations against their seatmates, or at the very least removing accusers instead of targets from flights.

And of course the driveling imbecility of a probable white nationalist who can't tell the difference between a page of calculus and a "furrin language" needs no further comment. As Mel Gibson said in Lethal Weapon 2: "Master race..."

Jane @5 - some nuance is in order. iIRC Southwest was the airline that removed passengers in the previous incidents, while this incident was AA. I doubt 'the government' had much to do with it any of those three outcomes: the airline decides to contact TSA or airport police, who then tell the airline there's nothing they're going to do about the passenger, then the airline takes it upon themselves to boot the person (or not). And so far, it looks like not all airlines are responding in the same way.

Sadly I think the only viable/likely solution is suing an airline who boots you for discrimination. Right now their decision-making is lopsided because there is no real downside for them for booting a passenger, while there are theoretically very bad downsides for ignoring a passenger complaint about a potential terrorist. We need to change their logic so that there is a cost for discriminating against passengers based on skin tone, or what language they speak, or because they do math.

I didn't suggest that the government made the airlines in the past cases throw passengers off the plane - though when the pilot decides to hand someone over to the security authorities because of another passenger's "discomfort", it's even odds he'll be in their hands too long to get back on the flight. My point was that the security people in the terminal whose time is being wasted by being called to interrogate a person who turns out to have committed the crime of being olive-skinned should consider charging the precipitating passenger with making false accusations. But certainly the airlines should be sued.

AIUI there was no 'falseness' to the accusation. By which I mean the complaining passenger gave the airline an accurate description of what they saw and felt - that they got nervous watching a person writing in what they saw was code. She didn't claim the dude was wiring a bomb or even drawing one. So I don't know what they would charge her with, and would probably object to her being charged with anything in the first place. Passengers must be allowed to complain to flight staff, even if some passengers are idiots. Its IMO the flight staff's job to separate the complaint wheat from the chaff.