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How an Israel Trip Changed My Perspective on Racial Bias
Recalling the uncomfortable experience of seeing discrimination targeting dark-skinned people who don’t look like me
When you’re Black in America, you spend your life getting used to being singled out. It happens with White friends, teachers, colleagues, bosses, business owners, employees, and law enforcement. But decades of experiencing the world as an outsider didn’t prepare me for the way I’d feel when I witnessed ethnic profiling strictly as an observer for the first time.
It happened in 2013 during my monthlong stint living in Israel. As the authorities paced the buses I took on my round trip from Jerusalem to the Palestinian city of Bethlehem, I squirmed in my seat and prayed I wouldn’t be one of the people they chose to detain. On both legs of the journey, the inspections seemed random at first. Specific travelers were asked to show their passports and sometimes ordered off the bus.
Eventually, I realized it was ethnic profiling in action. And for the first time in my life, it let me, the only Black person on the bus, slide. The detainees, though darker-skinned than the majority of the passengers, were all Arab.
