“Officer,” he said, “what if I told you that I’m an American citizen, and that we just came back from the State Department and the White House, where we were asked to speak? And after a day speaking to important people and feeling good about our democracy, now this will be my experience in D.C.? Because that’s what just happened. If Lincoln were alive, what would he say?” Mokhtar went on this way for a while, until the officer’s face seemed to soften. His eyes weren’t the eyes of a zealot or an ignorant man. They were the eyes of a man acting on orders and with limited information. “Well, I’m
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This is a heart-breaking anecdote about the sheer stupidity of a process designed to protect us based on radical stereo-typing.
