- originally published in fall 2021 -
“Be safe beta - it’s 9/11 Anniversary today.”
This one short message I received from my dad in our family group chat spoke volumes to me. For those of us like myself who grew up in a post-9/11 world, there is little conception of what life was like before that day twenty years ago.
Coming from India to America in the late 90s, my parents and their generation had to build their perception of this country as one in which people of their kind were targeted, victimized and killed chiefly due to the tangential similarity of their physical appearances to those of the terrorists that crashed planes into various martyred American landmarks. My family’s places of worship — the local gurdwara and Hindu temple — were meant to be havens for expats who left their home countries and customs in order to take advantage of better opportunities for their families.
I, like many people I know, owe a huge part of my upbringing to these havens. They taught me invaluable lessons about my community, my culture and my family values. They were mirrors of my parents’ world with vastly different reflections of my own. Doing seva in the langar hall, performing religious skits, playing holi every year, singing hours of aarti, nagging my parents to leave and so much more defined the bulk of my Indian-American experience.
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I can’t imagine what it would be like to suddenly be terrified to visit one of these places after someone completely unrelated to me committed a crime on the American conscience — potentially leading to people like myself being targeted by the American public at large. Obviously, racism and prejudice against our kind had existed long before this moment. But then more-so than ever, it became a scary time to be brown.
Stateside, the “war on terror” that followed 9/11 amounted to little more than an action replay of genocide shown on CNN to the general public. Propaganda and lies filled people with rage and paranoia against anyone who looked anything like the enemy combatants they saw in the media. And it didn’t take long for this to get under America’s skin — the first hate crime casualty occurred within just four days of the attacks. 645 incidents of racism as backlash for 9/11 were reported by news media in the first week alone.
And it didn’t stop there. Against a backdrop of oil-fueled wars that resulted in hundreds of thousands of reported civilian deaths in the Middle East (that still continue to climb daily), an idea of South Asian and Muslim-Americans not only as other but as enemies pervaded the American survival instinct. People became so scared of us that they started fearing old Sikh uncles and dadajis pushing 60-70 years old just because they wear turbans.
Although we as a nation became a terror to millions of innocent people in a region we scapegoated in order to turn a profit, domestic government and media machines successfully sold us a narrative that brushed horrific atrocities under the rug in the name of patriotism and “national security.”
Racism and prejudice post-9/11 has manifested in soft and hard ways — everything from schoolyard terrorist stereotyping to mass shootings was expected to and did happen. A post-9/11 America has no complete place for harmony with anyone who looks like they could be a terrorist or related to one. I grew up being taught to watch my back not just in the way that every child is, but in a way that made me hyper aware of my otherness. This itself manifested in ways I’m ashamed to admit.
I unconsciously compared people in my family and in my communities, those who I encountered at the temple and gurdwara, to what I saw on television and later on the internet. As a kid living in America where domestic culture is dominated by depictions of white people and ways of life, I grew disillusioned and disconnected from the community that anchored me to my roots and showed me nothing but love, nurture and support. For the longest time in my childhood, I didn't want to admit I was brown in fear of being typecast. It ultimately didn’t matter.
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It’s easy as a minority to long for white acceptance, as it remains the core of overall social and professional belonging in this country. And while this is an impossible dream that people of color either chase endlessly or neglect past the required extent, it hangs over the head of any community seen as “other” by the dominant cultural force. We are expected to adhere and conform by a country that will never let us belong inside of their predetermined boundaries.
While 9/11 is nowhere close to the only source of Islamophobia and anti-South Asian hate in America, it remains a cultural flashpoint that has forever changed the way we are perceived by the general American public and beyond. The “othering” of our people eclipsed the ignorant-yet-simple Apu caricatures and software engineer stereotypes to directly relate us to the enemy combatants we still see and hear about being gunned down on cable news.
This idea of us as the enemy has seeped into the American conscience. Our peers, coworkers, supervisors, teachers, mentors, friends and more called and compared us to “terrorists” and “Osama” out of ignorance — they still do, especially behind the closed doors of integrity. Fear stoked by misinformation on and sensationalist depictions of Middle Eastern and South Asian customs became second nature to the people that stare at us in the streets when we’re minding our own business.
My dad feels the need to send me text messages reminding me to watch my own back on a day where the very people who discriminate against people who look like me remind each other of what brings them together. What brings Americans together on that day isn’t just that sense of patriotism and belonging that feels as if it was never extended to us — it’s the narrative of “us” vs. “them,” the latter of which we belong to due to the color of our skin, the places our parents come from and the customs we hold dear.
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When I checked the news on 9/11’s twentieth anniversary, I saw nothing but content completely scrubbed of the lasting impacts of the attacks’ aftermath on our communities. There were virtually no mentions of hate crimes against Muslims or South Asians. Although the attacks shook our country as a whole, these glaring omissions of our continued suffering remain painful, revisionist erasures of history.
But it makes sense — showing the dark underbelly of patriotism is unfashionable on a day like 9/11. Media outlets, especially the mainstream left-leaning ones, perform progressivity only when it is convenient to do so. As a result, the problems faced by our communities must take a back seat to the media circus but might get a glimpse of the spotlight when the dust has settled.
This is because collective suffering is best viewed through a lens of relatability to the default white American experience. It is much easier for people to process and stomach the commemoration of a single event targeting the sovereignty of the state they belong to, than it is for them to empathize with the magnitudes-greater trauma felt by us and the billions of people living in our home countries.
Without a doubt, 9/11 was a terrifying moment for all Americans, regardless of race or religion. However, that fear manifested as widespread racist and xenophobic paranoia, which only exacerbated the problems faced by our communities. There remains little-to-no sympathy for communities that are made guilty by association due to a narrow American perspective on its brown citizens and residents.
It goes without saying that the discrimination we face is universally repulsive. It doesn’t matter whether or someone is Muslim or not — the oppressor simply does not care as long as we look the part. We (Hindus, Sikhs, Muslims, Christians etc. of South Asian descent) must stand with each other against discrimination and hate as it deeply affects us all.
We have got to do our part in protecting each other and organizing together in order to advance our causes. We are just as American and just as human as anyone else. No attempts at neglect or ignorance can ever succeed in stripping us of our rightful place in this country. We must ensure this conversation will look completely different twenty years from now.
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