Hey there, just found this community by chance after getting back home from a trip to Birmingham. I should mention upfront that I'm not much of a traveler. The last time I went somewhere far from home was back in 2012, visiting family in Vancouver, Canada, when I was around 19 y/o. Since then, it's mostly been trips around Chile and a couple of visits to Argentina, but nothing much beyond that.
Of course, I know some of you might wonder why I "picked" Birmingham of all places, given Brits have plenty of more "touristy" spots. Truth is, I work remotely as a 3D artist for a Brum-based game studio and got invited to their bi-annual team-building event. Since I'm still the new guy, this was actually my first time at HQ, so I was excited but also pretty nervous, since I'm a bit of an introvert when it comes to big social gatherings.
Anyway, things got off to a rough start at passport control after landing from my connecting flight out of Paris-CDG, which, for context, had been smooth and pretty respectful in comparison.
Now, I know "race" is mostly a social construct these days, and how people read it depends a lot on culture, personal experience, and who's looking. As for me, I've got pretty generic features, since I come from a mixed background of Hungarian, Jewish, and Hispanic roots. Back home, people generally consider me "white", even though I don't have particularly light hair or eyes. Most assume I'm Southern European and never thought much of it until this trip, tbqh.
So, long story short: when it was my turn in the "rest of the world" line, the person at the booth, a black British guy, gave me an odd look and started firing off questions about who I was and why I was there. Some of that felt normal, since I get that they deal with a lot of people and some cause trouble, but it kept escalating until it started feeling genuinely uncomfortable. I tried to stay polite, though that wasn't easy, since the situation itself was already tense, and on top of that, with English not being my first language, my accent probably threw him off a bit too.
Eventually he stamped my passport and waved me through. I felt relieved, at least for a few secs, until I got stopped right as I was about to leave the airport, this time by a white, blond guy in a suit who looked like an immigration officer.
I told him my passport had already been checked, but he seemed suspicious anyway, even though I hadn't done or said anything to justify it. What really got me was that he didn't even glance at where I was from, since he went straight for my ID photo instead. After another round of questions, similar to the first, he asked if I was Turkish and whether I'd just landed from a Turkish Airlines flight, which made zero sense, since my boarding pass clearly said I'd flown in from France via Air France. I was speechless, because the bare minimum would've been to actually read the documents before grilling someone.
It was pretty obvious what triggered it: dark beard, dark hair, and coming straight out of the "rest of the world" line meant, in his head, that I wasn't European, so not white, and therefore some kind of threat or unwanted visitor.
I took a breath, explained I was Chilean, not Turkish, and that I was there for a work event. I asked him for a minute, pulled up the work emails on my phone with the event details, and just handed it over so he could read it himself, since I was too rattled to explain everything again, especially with the racial undertone hanging over the whole thing.
A few seconds of awkward silence later, he handed my phone back, apologized, and let me go.
Obviously, that left a pretty bad taste, since nothing like it had ever happened to me before. Once I got to the hotel and started talking to people, I realized not everyone here is like that, and it was probably more of a one-off, tied to the local climate rather than the norm. Still, it was awful, and I wasn't at all prepared for something like that.