(no subject)

[batyatoon]

Can I just take a moment to froth in rage here?

"Why, Batya," you ask, "what has you so enraged?"

This.

I just. HOW IS THIS HAPPENING.



Edited to add: here's Raed Jarrar's own account of what happened. Thanks, madfilkentist.

Comments

[cleverthylacine]

Have you ever got additional scrutiny for having your hair covered? 'Cos I have.

[batyatoon]

Hard to tell if it was "additional," but yeah.

No one's yet given me a hard time for refusing to take off my scarf in public for religious reasons.

[cleverthylacine]

Oh, they weren't nasty and they didn't want me to undrape it in public. They weren't horrible about it or I'd have posted in indignation (you know me well enough). It's just that they definitely did give me more scrutiny than other people. Hard to tell if that was WHY, I just wondered if you'd had this experience, too.

[batyatoon]

You've also got darker coloring than I have, which may make racial profiling a factor.

[cleverthylacine]

It's the eyes and what you can see of the hair. My skin is actually pretty pale, but I have one of those faces that looks like it's from "Anywhere But Here" in America and "Two Blocks Over" anywhere else. Here in San Fran, people who can't speak English well are always trying to get me to speak Spanish to them. They will walk past 3 Latinas to ask ME whatever it is in Spanish. My knowledge of Spanish comes from Sesame Street. The only way I can get them to stop is to speak something else (usually Japanese, that being the non-English language I am best at) back at them, then they react "oh, THAT'S where she's from." Very very weird. Then I go to my little home town to visit my parents in West Virginia and everyone stares at me like I just landed from Mars. I'm in a long denim skirt and a long-sleeved t-shirt, one from Roaman's, the other from JC Penney, clothes that I deliberately chose with the idea of not freaking the natives out (my parents have been telling me I dress weird all my life, and yes, I do, but not all the time), and I look like I just beamed down to them. "Are you from New York?" No. No, I live in California NOW, but I am actually from HERE.

Every time I've ever been in Europe, people speak the native language to me whether or not I can speak it back to them. The really fun one is that this happened to me in Japan. (I actually did once speak Japanese quite well, but am now rusty, no longer fluent and given to using slang that is now eight years out of date?) I know when I speak Japanese I move like a Japanese, but I'm way bigger than most Japanese.

I want to visit Israel (I was going to go this year before California State Taxes bit me in places I shouldn't mention) but my Hebrew is the suck, and this is definitely going to happen to me there, so I'd better study first.