Is whitey scared or what? It seems an obscure Indian film actress and her family were detained for possible terrorist connections (it was all a big mistake-they sound like loud brown trash basically-the ugly Indian so to speak). Kind of funny actually. I know people are really scared and all-and I don't mind a little bit of cautious racial profiling if it'll put people at ease-but this confusion of South Asians with Middle Easterners since 9/11 really has me on a low-level alert for operation "Scare Whitey." I mean-you ask us to endure some hassles when we get confused for ethnic groups we have no resemblance to really (most Arabs are closer in complexion to Europeans than Indians in my experience-take a close look at Arabs next time and you'll see cousin Vinnie or your brother-in-law Constantine from Greece-not Vijay), so you have to expect us to use your fear against you for our amusement and humor (so far I've convinced one roommate that I'm hiding out in my room hatching conspiracies and leveraged the combination of ignorance and political correctness that so many Americans have in such large dollops to great entertaining effect!). Update: Americans removed from the immigrant experience in general are ignorant of say the difference between people from Thailand or China and Iraq or India. Ignorance knows no color, but I couldn't exactly say, "Let's scare whitey and blacky!"-since I don't want to be smeared as a racist. Thanks for understanding.... A thought on civil liberties: A few years ago, I remember an exchange between a "law & order conservative" and a "civil liberties liberal"-the former asked the latter why they chose to remain in a country that they criticized so, and the latter responded, "Because here I can." Of course there is a mundane interpretation of that last statement, but the conservative who a moment past was denigrating the liberal's patriotism was taken aback, and smiled broadly, and nodded. That is what separates this great country (and this great civilization) from the "shitholes" that a poster was commenting on. Of course, those cloaked by anonymity throwing insults show so much more courage than people who choose to dissent from the consensus-I tremble in fear. Clarification: I hope no one gets the impression that I agree with Norm Mineta's perspective that race should never be an issue. For instance, to someone from the Indian subcontinent, my name is clearly of Islamic origin. There are only a few dozen surnames that Muslims use in India-Khan, Kabir, Islam, Rahman, Bhutto, etc. Our first names, Akbar, Humayan and Muhammed are even easier. "Profilers" could easily be trained to pick out those of us with Islamic names out of the vast majority of South Asians who are basically a zero threat for terrorism in the United States. Similarly, there are Arab Sudanese who fit the phenotype of black Americans and Syrians who fit the phenotype of white Americans who might warrant further scrutiny because their names stand out. The fact is that a certain subset of Muslims are hostile to the United States, and unfortunately those of us of Islamic origin are much more likely by definition to belong to this group than non-Muslims. Race may be used as a proxy to aid in this, but ultimately Muslims are simply too racially diverse (Asian Malaysians, black Kenyans and white Turks and Bosnians not to mention brown South Asians) to be selected via crude racial profiling-people need to use their brains about this. My own personal experience with the average American is that people in these positions better get a lot of training-because I've passed myself off as Bosnian, Japanese, Finnish and Indonesian in the past few years with those geographically ignorant. I've had to deal with hostility during the Gulf War because I looked "Iraqi" and then paradoxically hostility because of tensions with North Korean in 1994 (?). These are at most irritations-all in all America is more racially tolerant than the vast majority of countries-but this level of ignorance can be appalling when you're trying to figure out someone's ethnic identity and the life and death of other's may depend on it.