Former detainees can reclaim dignity by confronting their jailers face-to-face

Evidence

But then he responded. “Ah, wow,” he said. “See? You cleaned up your act.” … Rasha stared into his eyes. “You know,” she said, inhaling deeply, “I wasn’t supposed to be there in the first place.” She then lectured him about how he should have known that and that he “needed to learn a thing or two about respecting others.” She could feel her chest rising the whole time. She ended by telling him, “You are a fucking asshole, and you will always be a fucking asshole.” And before he could respond, she twirled deliberately and walked back to her table with a stiff spine and an anxious but triumphal smile growing on her face. — Moustafa Bayoumi, How Does It Feel to Be a Problem? Being…, 169

Categorization

• XREF: The counselor’s ‘cleaned up your act’ line reflects the same presumption of criminality that pervades the whole book’s accounts of post-9/11 profiling — see the logic behind Rasha and her sister’s original MDC detention.