My Mixed Race Daughter and Niece And Our Racist Experience With An Immigration Official

Does racism ever leave Black people alone?

They say that there are two things that are certain in life: Death and taxes.

Well if you’re Black, I’d add racism to that list too. You are sure to encounter it. Now whether you acknowledge it or not is a different matter, but in an average life span, a Black person will for sure experience one form or another of racism whether it be overt or covert.

So I encountered another racism experience while traveling with my mixed race daughter and niece. It was utterly incomprehensible given that we were actually departing Switzerland — which is where we all are from!

I recall approaching the immigration line. On one end, there was a both for “all passports” and on the other it was for “Swiss and European Union nationals”. We decided to avoid the “all passports” queue as we believed it might take longer given that the people in that queue often need to show their visas or residency permits. So off we joyfully skipped to the other line, not really knowing that the racism we would encounter there would hold up the line for a bit.

My daughter and her cousin went first. As their guardian I stood closely behind them. I noticed that my daughter was taking a long time and wondered what was up. The immigration officer was demanding something of her and it caught her by surprise. She turned round to me and said he had asked her to sign her passport. She didn’t have a pen and asked him if he had one she could use.

“No I don’t,” he snapped.

He stared at her defiantly, probably enjoying the fact that he had intimidated her. He seemed to be enjoying his racist power trip.

Since I write, I always make it a rule to carry a ballpoint pen in this increasingly digital world. I pulled it out promptly, a tad victoriously. He looked at me in disgust, a smidge of anger etched into his stern features. He knew that he had no more reason to keep her at his booth. She signed it, and handed it over to him. He begrudging took it from her, checked it and handed it back.

And then it was my niece’s turn. She had checked that her passport was signed at this point. She handed it to him. He took it and and proceeded to inspect it slowly. He then put it through the scanner. He reminded me of a sloth I had observed at a noisy zoo many years ago. Again, he was trying to assert his dominance. He couldn’t find anything wrong with her passport so he of course had to let her go.

And then it was my turn. He seemed to proceed even slower. As a Black person, I always factor in lots of time for my flight because you never know who is going to hold you up. It can be immigration, at the check in desk, when you’re boarding. At any given time, a racist could give you a hard time and make you lose you flight. This guy didn’t know it, but I knew his type. The poor frustrated racist who couldn’t stand to see Black and brown people with a Swiss passport. He despised us, but there was nothing he could do to retain or detain us. He continued at snail pace, my face was expressionless.

You learn how to do that when racism irks the hell out of you. You don’t show any emotion, you don’t show that they’ve gotten to you, you remain indifferent. And so that’s what I did. As far as I was concerned, he could take all the time in the world, I didn’t care. I’m Swiss and I earned that passport and no one, will ever take it way from me, ever. So I relaxed into the stand-off, making myself comfortable, secure in the fact that he, the racist, would finally have to yield. And, he did.

I joined my daughter and niece on the other side. We walked a little distance out of earshot of the racist and I said.

“Oh my gosh, racism stinks”.

Both of them nodded. We talked for a short while about how racist the man had been. They had felt it too and were appalled.

I sometimes wonder how my daughter and niece who are Swiss will manage this type of situation in future. I mean they are Swiss, Switzerland is the only country they have ever known. Will they tolerate and calmly accept such racism in future? I have a tendency to accept it because I acquired my Swiss nationality after years of living here and sometimes feel I shouldn’t rock the boat too much because of that. But they, this is their home, their birthright, and a racist shouldn’t take that away from them.

We quickly moved on to another topic. The incident wasn’t worth our time and energy, but deep down inside, I thought: it would be good if we didn’t have to go through this every time we travel. No matter what we say and try to brush it off, it still colors our experience. Could you imagine if you had to go through that every single time you travelled?

Thank you for reading my perspective.