The Guardian: “Typecast as a terrorist”

Riz Ahmed, a Pakistani-British actor and rapper who struggled as a young actor to find work beyond two-dimensional stereotypical roles and who faced nearly constant interrogation and difficulty flying internationally after acting in such films as The Road to Guantanamo and Four Lions, says that airports and auditions are quite similar. In both, he is trying to play a fully realized three-dimensional character to an audience—producers and casting agents and immigration and security officers—who can’t get past the color of his skin and his “Muslim-sounding” name. Ahmed says:

You see, the pitfalls of the audition room and the airport interrogation room are the same. They are places where the threat of rejection is real. They are also places where you are reduced to your marketability or threat-level, where the length of your facial hair can be a deal-breaker, where you are seen, and hence see yourself, in reductive labels – never as “just a bloke called Dave”.  

Ahmed’s difficulty at airports—he was once illegally detained at Luton Airport where British intelligence officers insulted, threatened, and attacked him—echoes the treatment that many other Asians receive when traveling internationally, including actor Shah Rukh Khan, the “King of Bollywood,” who has been repeatedly detained at US immigration and who famously said: "Whenever I start feeling too arrogant about myself, I always take a trip to America. The immigration guys kick the star out of stardom."

After Ahmed’s experience at Luton airport—where he was illegally detained after having just won a film award for a movie about illegal detention—he wrote a song called “Post 9/11 Blues,” which included lyrics such as: “We’re all suspects so watch your back / I farted and got arrested for a chemical attack.”

In an airport holding pen, Ahmed explains, with few exceptions there are twenty slight variations of his own face, “like a Bollywood remake of Being John Malkovich. It was a reminder: you are a type, whose face says things before your mouth opens; you are a signifier before you are a person; you are back at stage one.” He adds: 

The holding pen also had that familiar audition room fear. Everyone is nervous, but the prospect of solidarity is undercut by competition. In this situation, you’re all fighting to graduate out of a reductive purgatory and into some recognition of your unique personhood. In one way or another you are all saying: “I’m not like the rest of them.”

With his passport stamped with visas and entries to such countries as Afghanistan, Iran, and Saudi Arabia, Ahmed found himself being questioned again and again. These “airport auditions” included such questions as “Did you become an actor to further the Muslim struggle?” and although so far they have always been successful in the end, “they involved the experience of being typecast, and when that happens enough, you internalize the role written for you by others. Now, like an over-eager method actor, I was struggling to break character.”

As he becomes better known (he has been featured recently in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, HBO’s The Night Of, and the latest Jason Bourne movie), his experience at US airports becomes smoother. Now he is often able to find the additional airport baggage search and questioning “hilarious rather than bruising.”  

“But this isn’t a success story,” he says. “I see most of my fellow Malkoviches still arched back, spines bent to snapping as they try to limbo under that rope. These days it’s likely that no one resembles me in the waiting room for an acting audition, and the same is true of everyone being waved through with me at US immigration. In both spaces, my exception proves the rule.”

NY TIMES: “Shah Rukh Khan, ‘King of Bollywood,’ Was Detained at a U.S. Airport for the Third Time”

Shah Rukh Khan, the “King of Bollywood” and one of the most popular actors in the world, was detained and questioned at Los Angeles International Airport last week, making it at least the third time he has had difficulty entering the US. While it is not clear exactly why he was held—Customs and Border Protection (CBP) say they cannot comment on specific cases—Khan has expressed that it is most likely because his name is the same or similar to a known or suspected terrorist.      

Khan announced his detention at LAX to his 20.8 million Twitter audience: “I fully understand & respect security with the way the world is, but to be detained at US immigration every damn time really really sucks.” He added: “The brighter side is while waiting caught some really nice Pokemons.” Previously, Khan was detained in 2009 in Newark while in the United States to promote his film My Name is Khan, which deals with racial profiling of Muslims after the 9/11 attacks, and in 2012, when he was detained in White Plains, New York, on his way to address students at Yale. “Whenever I start feeling too arrogant about myself, I always take a trip to America,” he later told the students. “They always ask me how tall I am and I always lie and get away with it and say 5 feet 10 inches. Next time I am getting more adventurous. ‘What color are you?’ I am going to say white.”

Khan’s many fans as well as Indian officials have condemned the stops and accused officials at American airports of racial profiling. In response, Rich Verma, the American ambassador to India, apologized to Khan on Twitter, saying that they are “working to ensure it doesn’t happen again.” Nisha Biswal, the Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asia, tweeted: “Sorry for the hassle at the airport, @iamsrk — even American diplomats get pulled for extra screening!”

Khan, who is estimated to have a net worth of $600 million in 2014, making him one of the richest actors in the world after Jerry Seinfeld, wrote in 2013 of being profiled and stopped at airports because of his name:  

I became so sick of being mistaken for some crazed terrorist who coincidentally carries the same last name as mine that I made a film, subtly titled My name is Khan (and I am not a terrorist) to prove a point. Ironically, I was interrogated at the airport for hours about my last name when I was going to present the film in America for the first time. I wonder, at times, whether the same treatment is given to everyone whose last name just happens to be McVeigh (as in Timothy)??

Many innocent individuals have mistakenly ended up on the terror watch list and no fly lists or faced travel problems because of similar names on the lists, including the late Senator Ted Kennedy, Nelson Mandela, and more than one minor, such as six-year-old Ohio girl Alyssa Thomas.

According to an investigation by The Intercept, federal government guidelines allow individuals to be “designated as representatives of terror organizations without any evidence they are actually connected to such organizations, and it gives a single White House official the unilateral authority to place entire ‘categories’ of people the government is tracking onto the no fly and selectee lists.” Curiously, it also allows for dead people to be watchlisted. Political activists as well as Muslims who have refused to become confidential informants have been placed on the lists, leading critics to accuse the federal government of using the no fly list as retaliation. The Guardian reports that Washington had previously denied allegations that Khan was singled out because his name denotes him as a Muslim instead simply stating that someone with the same name is reportedly on the US no-fly list, causing him repeated problems when traveling to the US.