How the world works wrote:
When a white guy gets interrogated by security screeners it's called normal procedure. For anyone else it's racial/gender/religious harassment.
One of the advantages of being the most common race in a society is you don't question why you're being stopped. You know it's not for racial reasons.
One of the concepts of "white privilege" is you get to go through life not questioning whether someone is doing something to you because of your race. Forget actual racism, but not having to wonder whether something is racist is a luxury Farah doesn't have. Farah operates in a different world because of his race and religion. Philosophically maybe we shouldn't care why someone treats us poorly and just focus on being treated poorly but that's not the real world.
I think a lot of the white posters on this thread are like "no big deal" and I understand the sentiment from what I saw on the vdieo (didn't seem like the officer was doing anything crazy) but Farah is coming from a different place.
Take Rojo for example. His name is about as common as it comes "Robert Johnson" but he used to be on a no-fly list and get interrogated every time he flew. Just some BS procedural thing. Pissed him off but he didn't tie it to race. Now if he was Muslim or a minority, he might think differently and it might piss him off more.
From what I can tell on the video and the police explanation it sounds perfectly reasonable to me but I wasn't there. I flew this weekend and I couldn't believe how nonchalantly they really pat your junk with the back of their hand if you get screened for patdown in TSA precheck. If I was a famous guy of colo like Mo Farah, I might wonder why they did it to me even though I think it's random.