Minoritized travelers lack a shared vocabulary to articulate border-profiling experiences even to sympathetic friends.

Evidence

It’s hard to articulate this to other people, because other people don’t have a concept to get it. If you say, “Yeah, I got put in the corner again at the airport; they did that whole thing to me,” your white friend might say, “Oh, that really sucks; yeah, that’s really bad.” But it’s hard for them to really get what the hell is going on. And the other Iranian Americans I know, despite being smart, it’s like none of us have a coherent philosophy of what’s going on. So we’re not talking about it. — Neda Maghbouleh, The Limits of Whiteness, 415

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes the ‘discursive inarticulacy’ theme in Naqvi’s Home Boy and Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist — minority subjects lacking a framework to name their own racialization.
• DEEPTHINKING: The observation that a group ‘hold each different pieces of a larger narrative’ without ‘collective infrastructure’ to assemble them names a real, general mechanism of how racialized experience stays individualized and unpolitical.