Just a week after an innocent Pakistani-born US citizen, Syed Fahad Hashmi, plead guilty to one count of material support to terrorists--in order that he avoid spending 70 years in jail--another Pakistani-born US citizen tried to blow up an SUV in Times Square. He ran away from the car shedding his shirt, before being apprehended on a flight bound for Dubai.

The media, intellectuals, and pundits alike have seized upon it as justification for a policy of heightened scrutiny of all Pakistani-born naturalized citizens. The thinking is that all Pakistanis are somehow potentially tied to Al Qaeda by virtue of descent.

Each and every time incidents like this are used to systematize new policies, nobody calls them what they are: racist, ethnocentrist and unjust. To do so, is to be labeled a traitor and un-American. By virtue of Syed Hashmi's race, nationality, and plea--coerced under what constitutes torture for three years--he is guilty by association.

This is not unlike how the Nigerian would-be bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, unwittingly placed all Nigerians on the Homeland Security watch list. (FYI, ABC News has video of a young Farouk blasting guns in Yemen.)

Back in January, as I passed through customs at JFK returning from holidays in Akwa Ibom, the customs officer openly asked his partner what was to be done with women coming from Nigeria. I waited nervously while they debated my case, turning my passport this way and that as they scrutinized the watermarks. All the while, I prayed they wouldn't open my luggage and discover the undeclared egusi and atama inside.

Finally, they let me go with a cursory glance, waving me through the sliding doors into the hustle and bustle of NYC. Thankfully, despite my ethnicity and brown skin, I do not look like a terrorist.

But this eyeball test is exactly what federal and state government officials are after. Take, for instance, recently passed legislation in Arizona that makes failure to carry immigration documents a crime. Residents are subject to being stopped by the police, held, and deported simply for "looking like" an undocumented immigrant.

Again, when people say the U.S. is a free country, I shake my head. We are living in a proto-fascist era. We're all guilty by virtue of race, religion, and nationality until proven innocent. And most brown people can't really afford adequate legal help if something goes wrong. If you happen to be rich, white and male (notwithstanding the standpoint of one of my readers), you can steal upwards of $50 billion and still enjoy your basic freedoms.

Tens of thousands of people with inauguration tickets, myself included, never made it in to the ceremony. (See Washington Post, People With Purple, Silver Tickets Turned Away.)

Holding tickets for the purple gate, a couple of friends and I joined an orderly line on the sidewalk at 5:30AM, braving the 20 degree weather like soldiers. The gates were scheduled to open at 10:30AM, but we came early like everyone else, prepared to wait a few hours (or five) to see our Barack. We bought apple cider from a street vendor, and handwarmers for our mittens, though my hands and feet froze anyways, the cold seeping into my bones.

By 8:00AM, latecomers clogged the streets in disarray, ignoring the line on the sidewalk, as the crowd grew gridlocked and impassable. One slight bend from a person three paces away and the entire group bent and swayed. As the crowd grew to immense proportions, I began feeling unsafe, wondering what would happen when they finally opened the gates and folks started pouring in to the Capitol grounds. I imagined myself getting pushed, elbowed, or worse as people charged the gate. And by 9:30AM, there was not so much as a cop in sight doing crowd control.

A portly girl stepped out of line and started barking orders at a gaggle of folks in the street, claiming she had trained a group of election day volunteers who obviously weren't doing their jobs. Frustrated by people ignoring her, while outnumbered 500 to one, she shrugged and stepped back in line.

A lone police car drove slowly through the crowd at 10:00AM, a cop leaning out the window with a megaphone yelling for folks to assemble in an orderly fashion. He didn't get out to direct the crowd, or call for back up, so we all pretty much stayed put. By 11:00AM, thirty minutes after we were supposed to be let in, they still hadn't opened the gate. It stayed shut at noon, when Obama took the Oath of Office, the powers that be deciding not to open the gate in the interest of our safety.

It was surreal. A crowd stretching for miles, hands raised, waving purple tickets in the air chanting, "Let us in! Let us in!" In the same spirit that led us to Obama's side, called us to volunteer in the campaign, and moved us to travel hundreds and thousands of miles to see his inauguration. We wanted so badly to participate. To have our tickets honored. Being denied felt like a miscarriage of justice.

Standing in the streets of Washington, DC surrounded by our elected officials, monuments, and police that are supposed to protect and serve us, it became painfully clear how futile the wait for relief must have been during Hurricane Katrina. Our government just ain't cut out for handling crowds -- of either manmade or natural proportions. And it was even sadder to witness our government fail us on the very day we thought we'd finally been saved. Sad to miss seeing Barack and Michelle's faces, to yell and scream until I wept.

Many people cried for Barack that day, but I shed tears for a different reason -- because we were robbed of a privilege we paid for, fought for, and should have been entitled to receive. I stood powerless realizing that they would not let us in, as the trumpets rang out to announce a President I elected, but whose inauguration I could not witness, without so much as a video screen in sight. We missed it. Though we were there early, waiting in below freezing weather for seven hours, we missed it. And I would be lying if I didn't say how heartbroken and disappointed I am about it.

Cornel West said it best when he noted that the task of the Obama administration is to foster an America that is more in touch with its realities on the ground, with the disenfranchised and poor. The real America is one in which miscarriages of justice occur every day, every hour, every minute. I have never felt so pushed down and held bound as I did yesterday.