If I wasn’t a black woman who had my hair aggressively prodded I would not believe this story. This is just an example of the subtle inequalities we experience but never speak of. This is very real unfortunately.
So after official complaints from two black women who said they were racially profiled by their “sisterlocks” hair styles, the Transportation Safety Administration (TSA) on Thursday (March 26) agreed to stop singling out women for screening based on the style, and says it will conduct anti-discrimination training sessions for its agents.
Malaika Singleton, a neuroscientist based in Sacramento, said she was on her way to London last year for an academic conference on dementia when a TSA agent at Los Angeles International Airport began pulling and squeezing her hair. The same thing happened when she passed through the Minneapolis airport on her way back home.
She contacted the American Civil Liberties Union, and it turned out that one of the lawyers there, a black woman who also wears the tiny, stylized form of dreadlocks known as sisterlocks had the same experience – twice.
Turns out the TSA apparently has no uniform explanation for the searches and statistics show that African Americans are searched more often by law officials than any other demographic.
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