Apologies for the long delay between posts.  I’ve been busy taking care of a few little matters, like getting married and going on a honeymoon…

Returning to Heathrow yesterday, tired, I finished the 18-mile trek from the gate to the passport control hall.  Picture that cavernous space, vacant on the right (some unmanned desks) and largely empty on the left, where my wife was heading with her British passport.  In the middle, a dense block of humanity, switchbacked through the maze of ropes guiding non-EU citizens to their inquisitors. 

The block was not only dense, it was dark.  Suddenly it clicked.  The gates next to our Alitalia flight (we were returning from the Puglia region of Italy – the heel of the boot – which I can enthusiastically recommend) were filled by two planes from Jet Airways, another two from Kingfisher and Air India, along with Arik Air, which a Google search confirmed is a Nigeria based airline.  There was also an Etihad plane.  That’s not the same thing as a mix of passengers from Delta, Qantas and Air Canada.  That dark block would move slowwwwwwly.  It looked like 90 minutes of frustration. 

These aren’t the sort (read: color/nationality) of people who get waved through after a perfunctory passport check.  Sad but true:  years of experience in queuing for passport control all across Europe and North America informs me to pick the line with the fewest dark faces.  Also to be avoided:  turbans, skull caps and headscarves of any kind (save yarmulkes), and (increasingly) Chinese faces.  (Assuming the oh-so-wrong idea that there is such a thing as a Chinese face).

[At this point, I need to make a disclosure.  I asked an attendant if I could be put in the Fast-Track lane, usually reserved for the doddering and doolally or the 9-month pregnant, in order to catch up with my wife.  I was then surprised to learn that if we were travelling together, I could join her in the queue for EU citizens.  Yes, an official benefit of being married! I sailed through with her, 5 minutes max.  Another disclosure:  in my youth, I may have felt guilty, or even stood as a matter of principle with the downtrodden.  But I am no longer young.]

Back to humanitarian action.  Administrative delay already impairs aid work in some countries, including outlandish difficulties to obtain the necessary visas and work permits for entry.  Long gone (mostly) are the cowboy days of driving around Country X without first getting a few signatures.  The trend strikes me as interesting.  Will the growth of non-Western humanitarian NGOs allow aid recipient nations to institute a two-track system, with us inching forward in a snaking line of uncertainty, enviously watching others whizz through? (Much as exists today though in our favour, for example, in obtaining UN or institutional funding.).   What happens when our identity, our identification as White/Western/European/Northern agencies, increasingly acts as a steroid pump up for the iron fist of administration gripping our collective throats?  Will queuing sap our drive and verve and effectiveness?  Will we grow to resent our hosts as they don’t appear to welcome out gifts? 

Those are relatively pragmatic questions.  More importantly:  will we learn to accept the indignity of second-class citizenship?  It boils down to this: in humanitarian action, white is becoming the new black.  And how will we manage being black?  Here’s my guess: not very well at all.