Shuffling along the cold airport floor with no shoes on, I stepped into the scanner and raised my arms. I was nervous. Growing up in a low-income, single-parent household, I had always viewed travel as an unattainable luxury, and now here I was, taking my second flight ever at age 24. My first, just two days earlier, had been fine, but this time, as I exited the scanner, a TSA agent stopped me. She needed to search my hair. Not a full-body pat-down, just my hair.
I'm black and have naturally curly hair — that day I wore it straightened, pulled back into a low ponytail. I'm sure hundreds of white women passed her by with the exact same hairstyle that day. I wondered if she'd stopped them, too. The agent put on a pair of blue gloves and patted three times across the top of my head. Then she waved me through.
Unsettled, I gathered my belongings and scurried to my gate, trying to collect my thoughts. Weren't they supposed to have stopped searching black women's hair? I thought, remembering articles about the TSA's response to black women's hair-search complaints filling my newsfeed a few years ago. There, on a hard plastic airport chair awaiting my second flight ever, I started Googling.
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