In Actual Fact

So, after leaving Paris after the weekend and taking the train back home, a familiar routine played out between Forbach, in France and Saarbrücken, in Germany (the last two incidents are described here and here). As usual, at Forbach, German border police (Bundesgrenzschutz) got onto the train and wandered through the carriages asking various people to show their ID cards or passports. In my carriage they asked only one person to identify herself – the woman sitting next to me. She was wearing a khimar. She duly produced her French ID card and showed it to the unnecessarily impolite officer, who then asked where she was going. Last week, the border police had singled out the one black guy in my carriage, who turned out to be the only German citizen amongst us. This kind of thing has been annoying the hell out me for years. When I had a British Asian girlfriend, who also lived in Germany, we (and more often still, she) were stopped for “random” checks on a regular basis, but she was a mouthy, politically active woman, who’d been arrested at Free Nelson Mandela marches and wasn’t going to take any nonsense from “fascist pigs” – the woman sitting next to me on the train just meekly did as was roughly demanded of her. It was about then that I decided not to remain quiet.
“Do you want to see my passport as well?” I asked in German. “I’m a foreigner too and I’ve heard plenty of American accents in here as well – they’re not even EU citizens.”
“Not necessary.” I was told.
“Why not – because I don’t look Muslim enough?” I managed to shout before he closed the door and entered the next carriage.
The girl sitting next to me looked embarrassed (and probably a little disturbed that she was sitting next to a lunatic that shouts at armed policemen), but about two minutes later a man in jeans and a t-shirt approached me and thanked me profusely for actually saying something. In the course of our conversation he also mentioned that he was from Iran (which has family had had to leave extremely rapidly in 1979), he then returned to his seat where his large, black rucksack was. Top marks to the Bundesgrenzschutz profiling team on spotting the dangerous head scarf though.

I was unsure about posting this, it’s a bit like waving my hand in the air and crying “look at me, I’m so tolerant”, but after reading about attitudes in my own country, the more people that say something, anything, anywhere, the better. Making a subset of our fellow citizens feel less than complete members of our society, only causes the words “violent backlash” to form in my mind.