Practice of Presence
How has it come to be that the paradigm of ‘security’ has become our collective default for the human experience of travel? Friday afternoon, at the LA international airport, moving through cordons of airport security trained to assess for threats, it struck me that the assumptions of suspicion and social control underlying the security measures and technology during international travel are, in fact, assumptions being designed into our social life at large. I began noticing how many of the airport personnel upholding the security practices were, in fact, people of color—and something about the surveillance state roping in bodies of color to dissect and reduce the embodied subjectivity of passengers made its agenda visible, of willfully and systematically corroding the emotion and practice of connection and trust within groups and communities that may conceptualize them alternatively, so that an embodied subjectivity can be “overwritten by the nefarious taxonomies undergirding white supremacy.” (Pauline Wakeham, Taxidermic Signs, 22)
How do we resist the violence being enacted within and rewritten into our relational and emotional spaces instead of capitulating and numbing out to it?