Anyone read The New Yorker profile on Phoenix sheriff Joe Arpaio this week? He’s the guy that is conducting a pathological crackdown on illegal immigrants (and there is rampant racial profiling of people who are legal) and employs prison tactics designed to humiliate – you may have heard of his parades of prisoners in pink uniforms—and also dresses them in archaic black and white striped uniforms—or his chain gangs in the blazing furnaces of Phoenix and his “tent city” prisons in the desert (with interior temps nearing 130 degrees, reports William Finnegan in the piece). Per New Yorker style, the piece lets Arpaio dig his own hole by showing what a pathetic publicity hound he is while also illustrating his appalling orchestrations of this “theater of cruelty.” Reading it, I found it shocking that a bigger deal hasn’t been made of him in the conversation about torture.
Earlier this summer, I got a very small, but potent taste of Arpaio’s Phoenix, just as I was leaving, in the airport. I gave my I.D. to the homeland security agent before going through security, as usual. He looked at my driver’s license, then looked at me, then looked at it again—again, pretty standard—then he looked up at me again and said, “And you are?”
I looked at him, completely confused—because he’s holding my I.D., right, so, why is he asking for my name? (Isn’t that the usual response to a “And you are” question?) So I say, “Um, I am…Renata Espinosa?” I phrase it as a question because I’m not sure what kind of answer he is looking for. “I can see that on your I.D.,” he says, and then he repeats the question again.
I realize that he wants to know my ethnic background—though here I am with a valid form of U.S. identification—and I’m annoyed that he doesn’t just ask, or that he insists on asking such a vague question. It makes me wonder if this is designed to unsettle the person who is being asked, so that they automatically get nervous and look guilty…of something. This time I respond, “I am going to New York City,” which is still not the answer he is looking for.
Again he asks the same stupid, vague question.
“That’s a very open-ended question,” I tell him.
He’s not being particularly mean, just insistent, and I start wondering if he’s just messing with me for fun, because he’s bored. He’s actually smiling and I don’t know whether I’m supposed to smile, too, like this is some big joke, or whether I’ll get in trouble if I do. So finally I say, “You want to know my ethnic background?” He nods yes. “Mexican and Spanish,” to which he says, “That’s what I thought,” and then he lets me through.
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