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African-America Research Papers

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Each year, millions of American travel by airplane. However, only a minority of the population are forced to check their rights when they check their luggage. As fundamental that citizens should be able to reach their destination with their privacy and other civil liberties intact, it is becoming increasingly harder. Being asked to remove your shoes and walk through a metal detector is nothing compared to what women — and some men — with natural hair have been forced to endure.
Until recently, the Transportation Security Administration (“TSA”) has been singling out African-American women and giving them arbitrary hair searches due to inconsistencies within their policies. TSA agents are charged with applying subjective rules to ambiguous (and …show more content…

But when primary screening results in an anomaly—this is generally because the magnetometer beeps, the full-body scanner shows something, or there's something suspicious in an x-ray image—in some cases people who don't meet the profile would be allowed through security without that anomaly being further checked. . . .At some point, your system is going to allow a person through but further check [another]. . . .
Being constantly subject to high scrutiny at an airport while others sail through because of how they look would also, no doubt, get old very quickly for many minorities. As Schneier further points out:
There's a reason profiling is often against the law, and that's because it is contrary to our country's values. Sometimes we might have to set aside those values, but not for [racial profiling in security checks].
Although this discussion was on extensive checks placed on Muslims, Schneider concedes that these extensive checks are applicable to all …show more content…

TSA agents have noted that “when the machine cannot read through [African-American] hair, we have to search it. The machine is the 170,000 per unit x-ray devices that can penetrate clothes and certain types of body tissue in order to highlight hidden weapons and objects. These scanners are so effective that they have raised several questions in regards to passengers’ right to privacy. Still, these machines, which have cost the United States almost $150 million, reveal almost everything- except what may be hidden in African American women’s hair. The TSA scanners barely register kinky hair, which gives the TSA license to violate our bodies through invasive and intrusive hair

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