Waris Ahluwalia stopped resisting rigorous airport security checks a long time ago.
The well-known Sikh American designer and actor says he’s grown accustomed to multiple bag searches, invasive pat-downs and incessant swabbing.
He’ll even let you massage his feet for foreign objects without protest.
After passing through two comprehensive screenings before his Aeromexico flight from Mexico City to New York City on Monday morning, he thought he was ready to board his plane. But security personnel thought otherwise.
“The security person said, ‘Now, will you take off your turban?'” Ahluwalia told The Washington Post, noting that he’s unsure of whether the man was employed by the airport, the airline, or both. “I said, ‘I won’t be taking off my turban here.’
“A group of Aeromexico employees spoke among themselves in Spanish and then one guy came back to me wearing an orange vest over a suit and said, ‘You will not be flying Aeromexico and you will need to book a flight on another airline.”
Instead of getting angry, the 41-year-old — who several years ago become the first-ever Sikh American model in a national Gap ad campaign — turned to social media, where he used his predicament to raise awareness about discriminatory airport screenings.
On Instagram, he wrote: “I was told I could not board my @aeromexico flight to NYC because of my turban.”
A second photo showed a somber-faced Ahluwalia standing in front of the airline’s customer service desk in Mexico City.
“My turban and beard represent my commitment to equality and justice,” Ahluwalia said in a statement distributed by the Sikh Coalition, a nonprofit advocacy group that works on behalf of followers of the monotheistic faith, which originated in South Asia in the 15th century. “If security personnel would like to respond with bigotry and fear then I will take another flight that’s more inclusive.”
He’s now refusing to fly another, “more inclusive” airline, too.
“At this point,” he said, “I realize that this isn’t about my convenience or getting home for lunch today. I realize that if I walk away, somebody else was going to go through this experience again.”
He added: “It doesn’t feel like a choice I can make. I don’t think I can just get on that plane.”
He’s refusing to leave, he told The Post, until the three demands — noted in a Sikh Coalition tweet — are met.
Ahluwalia, who is Indian American, has been featured in multiple best-dressed lists, including this Vanity Fair slideshow from 2010 touting his fashionable taste. He has also had roles in several Wes Anderson films alongside Hollywood stars such as Owen Wilson, Adrien Brody and Jason Schwartzman.
Even so, this is not the artist’s first brush with intolerance. In 2013, a Gap subway advertisement using his photo was defaced with anti-Muslim graffiti in New York, according to the Huffington Post.
The caption on the ad was changed from “Make Love” to “Make Bombs,” Huffington Post reported. The defacer also wrote “Please stop driving TAXIS” on the image.
In recent months, Sikh advocates say, there has been a growing number of violent and discriminatory incident targeting members of the religious group.
“For Sikh Americans, the unique markers of religious identity — the turban, the beard — these markers are associated with the markers of terrorism,” Simran Jeet Singh, a senior religion fellow at the Sikh Coalition, told The Post’s Sarah Kaplan in September,
In other words: “People see a Sikh and construe them as the enemy.”
Harsimran Kaur, the Sikh Coalition’s legal director, told The Post in December that the backlash against people who are perceived as being non-American has been exacerbated by anti-Islamic statements made by Republican presidential candidates such as Ben Carson and Donald Trump. Carson has said that the United States should not elect a Muslim president, citing concerns about “different loyalties.” Trump has called for a “total and complete” ban on Muslims entering the United States.
“Trump’s statements legitimize nativist impulses,” Kaur told The Post. “It’s why we’re seeing more profiling and vandalism and intimidating incidents. We’ve been speaking to the family of an elderly man who was hit in the head with an apple a few days ago. These are the kind of things that you start to see as the political rhetoric escalates.”