Shipler and his disciples

In his 1997 book, A Country of Strangers: Black and White in America, David Shipler wrote:

This is the ideal: to search your attitudes, identify your stereotypes, and correct for them as you go about your daily duties.

On the morning of September 11, 2001, Michael Tuohey, a ticket agent for U.S. Airways,

was suspicious of [Muhammad] Atta and Abdulaziz Alomari when they rushed through the Portland International Jetport to make their flight to Boston that day.

Atta’s demeanor and the pair’s first-class, one-way tickets to Los Angeles made Tuohey think twice about them.

“I said to myself, ’If this guy doesn’t look like an Arab terrorist, then nothing does.’ Then I gave myself a mental slap, because in this day and age, it’s not nice to say things like this,” Tuohey told the Maine Sunday Telegram. “You’ve checked in hundreds of Arabs and Hindus and Sikhs, and you’ve never done that. I felt kind of embarrassed.” [Emphasis added]

I was reminded of Tuohey’s story, which I had mentioned at VFR once before, because Tuohey was interviewed by Oprah Winfrey this afternoon and a friend called me up and told me about it. Tuohey spoke about the distinct chill he felt when he looked into Atta’s face and felt the anger that was in him. He is now a troubled man because of what happened that day and the thought that he could have prevented it. But then he seemed to tell Winfrey that there was nothing more he could have done, other than what he did do, which was to withhold the terrorists’ boarding passes so that they had to go through a check-in again in Boston. Winfrey didn’t press him further, staying in her usual empathy and tears routine, rather than have a guest engage in actual critical thought about himself.

Is it really clear that there was nothing more Tuohey could have done? I don’t believe it. If you’re a ticket agent, and you sense something not right about two passengers, and you even have the thought that these guys look like terrorists, and there are objective correlatives to back up your suspicion such as the one-way first-class tickets, there are things you can do. But Tuohey, though tortured by his failure to stop the attack, apparently has had no real second thoughts about the beliefs that led him to act the way he did. He remains a disciple of Shipler, and of Oprah.

Someone should ask our president, if an agent in Tuohey’s position had had the kind of suspicion he had, and had stopped someone like Atta for further questioning and prevented him from getting on a plane, and the passenger then complained of racial profiling, would you back up the agent, or not?

Also, it seems that the female ticket agent in Boston who waved through Atta and Alomari committed suicide some months after the 9/11 attack. If we lived in a society that did not tell people to resist their stereotypes, that woman might have stopped the terrorists, and thus have stopped the attack, and not ended up committing suicide.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at September 11, 2006 04:52 PM | Send