Abstract
In August 2009, the renowned Indian actor, Shahrukh Khan, was detained at Newark International Airport. According to Khan, his Muslim surname led American immigration officials to question him about the nature of his visit for over two hours. Imagine what those immigration officials must have thought when they learned that the purpose of Khan’s visit was to publicize a movie in which a character named “Khan” is falsely accused of being a terrorist. Khan was racially profiled while publicizing a movie about racial profiling. The purpose of Khan’s visit raised suspicions that his detention was purposefully triggered or, at the least, exaggerated for dramatic effect. In any case, news spread quickly that one of India’s best-loved celebrities, the man the Los Angeles Times called “perhaps the world’s biggest movie star,” had been detained at an American airport. The American ambassador to India quickly released a statement that “Shah Rukh Khan, the actor and global icon, is a welcome guest in the United States.” But the damage had been done.2
I have brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, uncles and cousins of every race and every hue, scattered across three continents, and for as long as I live, I will never forget that in no other country on Earth is my story even possible.
—Barack Obama, “A More Perfect Union”1
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Notes
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Slate, N. (2014). Epilogue. In: The Prism of Race. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137484116_8
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