It’s the setup for a bad joke: What do you do when you see two Asian men at an airport gate?

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Call for an evacuation.

That’s what happened in early September 2019 at Newark Airport after an Alaska Airlines flight attendant sounded an emergency alarm. Hundreds of screaming travelers sprinted through the terminal and crashed through glass in hopes of getting to safety. One person who was there called it “ absolute chaos “ and the “most terrifying few minutes of my life”.

The allegedly security threat at the center of this chaos? Han Han Xue and Chunyi Luo, two complete strangers who happened to be standing near each other while waiting to board a flight to San Francisco, and were later found to have done nothing wrong.

Meanwhile, hundreds of passengers had their travel plans disrupted and everyone had to go back through security. Many people including Xue and Luo missed their flights and had to stay overnight to catch one the next day. Not to mention the psychological impact of such a fear-inducing incident.

Newark is the 6th busiest airport in the nation by international traffic with tens of millions of passengers passing through its halls each year. Efficiency and safety are presumably high priorities for anyone who works there. How did this happen?

Breaking Down a Racist Encounter

As reported in BuzzFeed News, the Alaska Airlines flight attendant first made contact with the men when she walked into Xue, a 29 year designer at the tech company Lyft, from behind. She then circling back on both Xue and Luo, a 20 year old college student, and asked if they were “scared” and wanted to know why they were “acting suspiciously”.

She then asked Xue if the two men knew each other (they had never met) and wanted to know if an unnamed “they” was paying him or had given him or his family a visa.

A few unanswered questions I have:

What made her single these men out?

Why was she questioning them in public instead in a private area?

Why does she assume they aren’t US citizens?

Why didn’t her coworkers intervene?

Or the other travelers for that matter?

The flight attendant then confers with a gate agent who announces boarding would be paused. But then, rather than have security directly question these men, she suddenly hits the emergency alarm button and starts screaming for an evacuation. That’s when all 200 passengers started running, including Xue and Luo.

Dozens of officers arrived on the scene and eventually found and questioned the two men before releasing them without any charges.

If there was any justifiable explanation for why these men were seen as a threat beyond simply their ethnicity, it would have been shared with the press as rationale for this harrowing and expensive incident.

The only thing we’ve heard is that she is bipolar and had an issue with her medication. Which raises the question of whether this person should be in a different line of work.

Ultimately the mental instability defense is a flimsy shield for the truth: she held an unjustifiable bias against people of Asian descent.

The impact of racism in America isn’t merely a result of those who actively harbor and act on their prejudiced beliefs, but everyone who enable them. Alaska Airlines is based in Seattle, a city that has 14% Asian population. None of the other travelers or crew members saw any issue with two Asian men standing next to each other, and yet they allowed one woman’s racism to upend the travel schedules of hundreds of people.​​

Asian Are Still Outsiders to American Society

What happened in Newark is not an isolated incident. It is part of this country’s frequent “othering” of Asian Americans, something experienced by even our most visible members.

In her 2016 Senate campaign, then Rep. Tammy Duckworth (D-IL) highlighted her family’s history of military service during a televised debate. Duckworth’s mother is Thai and her father, who was white, served in the US Marine Corps. Kirk’s response was to deny Duckworth’s claim to her father’s heritage. “I had forgotten that your parents came all the way from Thailand to serve George Washington”.

Starts around 22:30

Democratic Presidential contender Andrew Yang was told he should “go back to China or wherever he came from” by a right-wing radio host and called a “Jew chink” by comedian Shane Gillis (who SNL briefly hired with the hope of appealing to conservative viewers). Yang, who has been in all 5 of the Democratic Presidential debates, was born in Schenectady, New York to Taiwanese immigrants.

Like Xue, I was born in China, but grew up in and became a citizen of a North American nation (Xue is Canadian, I’m American). I remember being asked frequently as a child if I was related to any Asian friends or classmates because we “look so similar”. Like many, I have heard and answered the question “where are you really from” far too many times.