(POSSIBLY OFFENSIVE OR SENSITIVE TO SOME PEOPLE: NO OFFENSE INTENDED -- IT IS ALSO SPECULATION AND MAY OR MAY NOT BE TRUE)
When I went to get tapes for the camcorder I was using (it's a friend's, not mine) ... after I had left FYE at Lloyd Center, I was fiddling with the camera, trying to get it to work. It's a finicky camera, so I had to fight with it a bit from time to time. Anyway, on my way out (this was in the parking garage) this security guard came up to me and asked me if I was taping anything. I wasn't recording anything ... I said to him that I was having trouble getting the camera to work, which was a fact, and I explained that I was a convention attendee. Then he was like "Oh, okay ..."
Here's what came to my mind:
He may have mistaken me for being an Islamic extremist terrorist because I have an olive complexion and dark hair. And I had a video camera so that probably meant to him that I was taping the flow of people in and out of a public place in preparation for an attack or something.
First off, my ethnic ancestry is Italian and Puerto Rican. And I am Roman Catholic, not Muslim. But I look very Mediterranean. I have been mistaken for Greek or Middle Eastern; but I am neither of those.
Number two, the security guard perhaps racially/ethnically discriminated against Muslims themselves. My speculation for this is that I think he assumed a guy with dark hair and an olive complexion holding a video camera was a Muslim terrorist and Islam = evil. Islam itself is not a bad religion; it's actually a way of life based on good and noble prinicples (it's just that people like the terrorists are perverting it into something very bad and uncharacteristic and giving it a bad rep). He also made the mistake of assuming that I was something I'm not.
This experience wasn't so much scary as it was insulting; insulting to me and insulting to good, upstanding, law-abiding Muslims (even though I am not Muslim) ... but in another way it was very scary because it's discrimination and it feels like I have to live in fear. Heightened vigilance screws everybody up. Hightened vigilance makes everybody else heighten their vigilance and I feel I can't be myself at times; I feel I must distance myself from people and the government as much as possible because people and institutions seem like they will do anything they can to get you in trouble. America has become a culture of fear in some respects. I've also been stereotyped for being in the mafia just because of my painfully obvious Italian heritage. It's so messed up that people do this kind of thing ... we're all freaking human beings here!
Or then again, maybe I'm wrong about all this. I won't deny that I'm wrong if I am.
Oh well ... I didn't let that experience ruin my time at the con. Aside from that little fiasco, there were really no hiccups that I can think of.
