Why Is the TSA Still Searching Black Women's Hair?
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.
Reba Perry-Ufele’s hair search was more invasive than mine. She and her 12-year-old daughter, Egypt, were catching a flight from LAX in April 2017 when TSA agents — officially called Transportation Security Officers (TSOs) — pulled Perry-Ufele aside to search her crochet braids. Perry-Ufele found it odd that the white woman in front of her, whose hair was “all over the place,” wasn’t stopped. She told the TSO that she didn’t want her hair searched. But the agent claimed it was protocol, Perry-Ufele says, and began pulling Perry-Ufele’s braids apart, asking about the extensions that were added to make them thicker.
“I was so embarrassed, because not only did she humiliate me but she did it in front of the other people,” Perry-Ufele explains. “And she literally ripped my braids apart until they were a mess and I had to take them out when I got home.” Perry-Ufele says she emailed a letter to TSA, but did not receive a response.
As I read through the TSA’s list of black women’s hair-search complaints, I saw the same refrain over and over: That the complainant believed her hair was patted down specifically due to race, and that she found the experience demeaning.
“[I] watched a few other women walk through without having their hair searched. My hair is in locks that were pulled back from my face,” one woman who passed through the Columbia Metropolitan Airport in South Carolina wrote in her September 16, 2016 complaint. “I felt violated. I thought TSA agreed to stop searching black women’s hair. I’m looking into taking legal action.”
