WILLIAM CRAIG

HARTFORD, Vt.

ARRIVING a few minutes late, I told my students about a delay at the Interstate 91 Border Patrol checkpoint in Hartford, 100 miles from the Canada line. "Oh," a twenty-something student asked, "you mean the `Whiteness Checkpoint' ?"

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His classmates didn't laugh out loud. They just snickered, appreciating an apparently well-worn joke.

"Excuse me?" I was shocked -- though not by their dead-on assessment of the checkpoint.

When that barrier was first set up in December 2003, ostensibly to fight terrorism, Border Patrol agents stopped every driver to ask, "American citizen?" But long before summer, they started waving white people like me right on through. We've been more or less exempt ever since, regardless of the threat alert's color.

No, what shocked me was my students' cynical yet naive acceptance of injustice. Like me, they knew blacks and Asians who complained of repeated harassment -- but my all-white students accepted the "Whiteness Check" as part of the "war on terror," even as they joked about how easily a real terrorist could detour around the checkpoint.

"So," I asked, "you don't mind racial profiling, as long as you're exempt?"

"Hey," one young lady answered, "it could stop another 9/11."

We had to get on with class, so I didn't reply.

Now the Border Patrol wants to spend $9 million to make that checkpoint permanent.

And now I wish I'd told my students that -- day in, day out -- I'm not afraid of Al Qaeda. I believe in America, and I don't think terrorists can defeat its free people. But I do fear what the Founding Fathers wanted all Americans to fear: the surrender of liberties to unchecked power. In the past, America triumphed over disaster, depression, and even the threat of global nuclear war, not by restricting civil rights but by expanding them. Yet today's leaders claim 9/11 somehow "changed everything." Stoking our fears to squelch dissent, they have created an unprecedented America: one in which citizens must pass internal checkpoints, can have their privacy invaded without warrant, can be detained for years without trial, and can inflict -- or suffer -- officially sanctioned levels of torture.

As my students know, the checkpoint in Hartford is laughably unlikely to catch any Al Qaeda terrorists. And it's hardly an efficient use of Homeland Security money -- not when New York City has fewer cops and first responders than on 9/11.

But the checkpoint is a highly visible propaganda tool. It reminds us to be afraid. Everywhere and -- as they say in Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, and even jails on US soil -- "indefinitely."

The checkpoint says "security" is more important than liberty, that we need to elect people who are "strong" enough to weaken our constitutional freedoms.

It tells us the enemy is someone other than "us" -- someone who perhaps "looks Muslim" -- and can be routinely harassed. Don't get me wrong. My quarrel isn't with those dedicated Border Patrol agents, many of them Hispanic, who no doubt believe in their mission. But when they wave me through the I-91 "Whiteness Check" -- or worse, when they repeatedly pull over a neighbor who was born in Mogadishu, Lahore, Beirut, or South Philly -- I know that America has made a terribly wrong turn.

William Craig is a writer and teacher living in Thetford Center, Vt.