make them look you in the eye

When choosing how to have your privacy violated (method A, nude x-ray photographs, or method B, invasive “pat-downs”) at the airport, Elusis blogs that we should opt for the pat-downs, while looking the patter-downers in the eye. She compares TSA screenings to Stanley Milgram’s experiments on obedience to authority, and notes that compliance dropped–subjects refused to administer (fake) electric shocks to other people–when they were in the same room, confronted with the humanity of those being shocked.

Elusis also reminds us that “nothing about this is new. Private citizens being arbitrarily singled out for intrusive searches and rough treatment by authority figures because of their appearance, their ‘attitude,’ or just a momentary need for an endorphin rush by a small-minded bureaucrat? Welcome to the lives of people of color, the...

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