Racial Profiling in the age of TTT

Tejas Desai

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Jan 29, 2025

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Apparently the era of racial profiling has returned with the advent of TTT (Trump, Tech Bros, & Tariffs) in the TT (Turbulent Twenties). While micro-incidents occur constantly, here are a few more obvious instances that occurred to me personally the last couple of weeks.

On Saturday night, while in Phoenix, Arizona, for the ALA LibLearnX Conference where I gave a well-received presentation the day after, I attended the Suns-Wizards game with 5 other librarians, an ethnically, sexually and age-diverse group of 3 women and 3 men (including myself). However, when we entered the area of the stadium, only I was singled out to go into a special line to be screened, which took an additional five minutes or so — I had to empty my pockets and go through a metal detector, which I passed with flying colors.

At the airport on the way home, I emptied my pockets and went through the metal detector. I was through without ringing and cleared by the security guy, only to be pulled back by a “random” screening. So I went back through the detector I had cleared and to the side. After waiting for a bit, I went through the scanner where you raise your arms and wait 3 seconds. I was cleared again, but then I had to sit in a chair and remove my shoes. My ankles were scanned and inspected, and then my shoes were put through the item scanner again. The old white dude “randomly selected” after me didn’t have to sit down or remove his shoes, his ankles were inspected over his shoes, and he was able to get out of that area before me.

The most egregious incident (and most disturbing to me, anyway), didn’t occur with an authority figure, or even at a security clearance. It was on the way home from Auckland, New Zealand to New York. I actually got very lucky — American Airlines had overbooked their flights, so I was switched to a non-stop flight on Qantas and was able to get home 7 hours faster, on a better airline with better food and better service, and I didn’t have to go through customs in LA and check my bag/go through security again. The only issue was that I was sacrificing two aisle seats for a middle seat on a 15 hour flight, but even that was rectified when an elderly couple from Long Island wanted to sit together and gave me the aisle seat next to them.

The trouble began when I conversed with the couple next to me. I usually do befriend my fellow travelers, and they were a nice and accommodating couple for the most part, traveling with their kids and grandkids (they were paying for a two-week vacation for the entire family to Australia and were transiting through New Zealand) who were sitting in a different part of the plane. But when the couple told me they were “going home,” and I happily said I was going home too, there was complete silence and the man started becoming very defensive. “My grandfather was the first person to live in those towers in Fresh Meadows” he said angrily when I mentioned the neighborhood where I lived. We kept conversing though on various topics, and hours later, when I mentioned that I was born at Flushing Hospital, he immediately and aggressively asked, “You were born here or there?” Even though I had already told him. I had to explain to him that my parents immigrated as permanent residents in the 1970s, I was born in the early 80s in NYC, they served NYC for nearly 40 years and I lived my whole life there except college etc. Later, again seemingly perplexed and in disbelief, he asked, “Where did you go to high school?” Then I basically told him my entire schooling (2 hr subway/bus trips through hell etc.) and life story. By the end of the flight, perhaps impressed, he implied I should court his unmarried, similarly-aged daughter, and while she might be very nice, I don’t exactly want an ignorant and racist father-in-law like the character in my story “Old Guido” (in Good Americans).

After all, why did I have to explain all this to him? He certainly wouldn’t have reacted that way or asked me any of that if I was White. I could have been on a tourist visa or an undocumented immigrant and he wouldn’t have questioned anything I had said if I was White. But because I’m Brown, he needed extra convincing that I was Natural Born. Whether that even convinced him that I was “American” is yet another question. We didn’t discuss politics — although I did express my dissatisfaction with Congestion Pricing — his position was that it was an obvious money-grab and while he would pay through his teeth because he had to drive into Manhattan twice a week to take his wife to the doctor — she was coughing half the time with a lung condition — he didn’t mind because he was rich enough not to care, yet another example that supposedly “progressive” policies like Congestion Pricing just benefit the rich — but either way, I wondered whether his anger was influenced by anti-woke godfather Vivek Ramaswamy’s recent comments at the time that were spun by many as implying that Asian-Americans were superior to White Americans.
https://x.com/VivekGRamaswamy/status/1872312139945234507?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1872312139945234507%7Ctwgr%5E3ae9ed9858039ba3b70a645b1ed1680748b68877%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.usatoday.com%2Fstory%2Fopinion%2Fvoices%2F2025%2F01%2F14%2Fvivek-ramaswamy-tiger-parents-burnout-school%2F77421962007%2F&mx=2

And while I don’t like Vivek at all, he basically was making a “Tiger Dad” argument about American parenting culture, not race, that Asians tend to force their kids to be “extraordinary” academically while White parents tend to want their kids to be “well-rounded,” focus on sports and therefore are likely to be “ordinary.” That’s generally true parenting-wise (although not in my case) but it’s certainly not true that being a nerd is the only way to be “extraordinary” and how can one even be “extraordinary” if most people aren’t “ordinary”? You need both in any society.

So my plane buddy could have been angry about that, I don’t know, and especially about the fact that Vivek defended the H1-B Visa because those individuals are coming in based on merit, which Vivek values and believes could happen here too if American parents just kicked enough ass. But that doesn’t just apply to Indian nationals — after all, the Danish guy I sat next to for 12 hours in Sydney on New Years Eve while waiting for the fireworks — whip smart as far as I could tell — was also studying software engineering and also desperately wanted an H1B Visa to the USA so he could make a lot more money than in Denmark (so was an Indonesian girl I met later).

Something else that occurred to Vivek Ramaswamy might also be worth mentioning here. It was his interview with Ann Coulter while he was a Presidential candidate, where she began by praising him to the moon (she agreed with pretty much everything he said, more than Donald Trump and any other Republican candidate, she claimed),
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4SQyWQIE2yU
but that she couldn’t vote for him because he was “an Indian.” Vivek (and Ann) tried to spin this in a later interview by saying that Coulter meant he wasn’t Second Generation, as some douchebags, including a Republican African-American friend of mine (“and I’m the black guy saying that,” he stated about my potential candidacy), have implied because First Generation Natural Born Americans are too “suspicious” and tied to their parents’ countries/cultures (This is not true at all Constitutionally, or Rationally).

However, this is not what Ann Coulter said, nor is it, I think, what she meant. She said it was because Vivek was “an Indian,” which would apply even if he was an Eighth Generation American (improbable, but possible, there have been ethnic Indians in what’s now the USA since the 1600s). Basically, as my White American plane buddy figured, he and I are “perpetual foreigners,” as are all Asian Americans.

Whether this is sentiment prevails among a majority of Americans (or even the half that voted for DT) is more questionable, but it clearly is an issue that persists (the glass ceiling, the fact that we’re constantly confused for each other etc.) I recall a statistic when Andrew Yang was running in 2020 that Americans would be more comfortable with a gay white male President than an Asian-American one (though not an Atheist — although curiously it’s okay to vote in a twice-impeached insurrectionist, sore loser, traitor, liar, cheater, draft dodger, convicted felon and rapist, and aspirant Dictator).

Indian-American women seem to have a slightly easier time — obviously there’s Kamala Harris (lost), Nikki Haley (lost), other Indian American governors and an endless succession of Indian American CEOs, White House-Pentagon department heads and staff, even a Miss America.

Thankfully, I don’t plan to run for POTUS anytime soon, which might be for the best because let’s face it, a Tejas Desai Independent run will be a 1,000 times crazier than a Donald Trump run, so maybe I will spare the world, or maybe not, it depends how bad things get…

Yet you know I’m going to spin all this towards my new book BAD AMERICANS, which starts to come out in March 2025 and will be published a month apart until April 2026. Because this issue is front and center in several individual stories — particularly “Immigrants Unite!” “Love Liability” and “Cape Conundrum” — as well as the frame story. The first 6 ebooks are ready to go and I’m debating whether to put them as pre-orders or not. But you can start to read about them here, and there will updates soon!

http://tejas-desai.com