People's Democracy

GROWING XENOPHOBIA IN US

Vijay Prashad

A FEW hours after the suicide attack on the World Trade Center (WTC) and the Pentagon, a combination of official and unofficial acts against those with brown skins took place across the United States. Within minutes after the WTC attacks, angry white men yelled obscenities and chased Amrik Singh Chawla of Brooklyn, New York, down the street, and his only escape was to hide his turban in his briefcase. Shades of Delhi, 1984.

In the small state of Rhode Island, officials stopped a train, handcuffed Mr. Shyrone Kaur and removed him from the train. He was detained primarily because of his turban and colour of his skin, perhaps all he shares with Osama bin Laden. Indeed, this Sikh man’s turmoil was to be visited on Sikhs across the United States.

Within a few days, Sikh community organisations and civil rights groups reported over fifty attacks against Sikhs. A white man assaulted an elderly Sikh man who was then taken to the hospital, just as unknown assailants firebombed a Sikh gurudwara near Cleveland, Ohio. The day after the WTC attack, train officials and the police removed Meera Kumar and a group of South Asians and Arabs from a Boston-New York train. Two days later, at a meeting to discuss the hate crimes organised by the South Asian Journalists Association in New York, a man who was talking his baby on a walk assaulted one of the Sikh participants. "You Islamic mosquitoes should be killed," he yelled, a phrase captured by TV Asia and run on its show through the day.

"Americans saw Lawrence of Arabia and think all Muslims wear turbans," said Kevin Fitzpatrick, an organiser with the New York Taxi Workers Alliance. Manga Singh, a taxi driver, reported to NYTWA that a passenger started to beat him with an umbrella while yelling, "I hate you, I hate you and your turban." Mr. Singh’s father, Surinder Singh, is also a taxi driver and he reported that a rider said to him, "You did that, you attacked the World Trade Center." One Sikh man, Balbir Singh Sodhi, a worker at an all-night store, was shot to death in Mesa, Arizona by a man who told the police, "I stand for America all the way."

Hours after Mr Sodhi was found dead, an unknown assailant shot Waqar Hassan of Palestinian origin, at Dallas, Texas. Mr. Hassan was at work as a store clerk at Mom’s Grocery when he was shot. Mosques joined gurudwaras in the saturnalia of random violence, just as South and West Asians of all faiths began to join Sikhs as targets of retaliation for the WTC.

The bulk of the attacks did not take place against all those who are of West and South Asian descent, but against the working-class and small merchant sector amongst them. Those who worked the lonely, long-hour jobs at kiosks or in taxis, faced the wrath of their customers, while the ethnic neighbourhoods (generally peopled by the working class) became a visible target for retaliation. The professionals whose homes are lost in the thicket of white suburbs faced suspicious looks and suffered the indignity of racism, but no significant physical violence. Mr. Ashraf Khan, for instance, is a cell-phone magnate. He was removed from a first-class seat on a Delta Airlines aircraft because the pilot felt that he endangered the plane. The fear set in amongst all classes, even as the working-class bore the brunt of the retaliatory violence. The volume of the attacks was not enormous, and yet a general sense of fear pervaded South and West Asians in the US. Many refused to leave their homes, to go to work or to school, and many foreign students got on the first plane back to their homelands.

FAÇADE OF INTERVENTION

Things got so bad, so fast that President George W. Bush had to make an appearance at a Washington DC mosque on September 17^th to mollify desis and Arabs, as well as to say "those who feel they can intimidate our fellow Americans by taking out their anger, they don’t represent the best of America." ! Indeed, the US media began to run stories about how ordinary Muslims did not feel kin with the WTC attacks, indeed that most Muslims condemned them and that Islam is a faith of peace (this is just as they wrote in rabid tones about the radical Islamicists, a necessary ploy to dehumanize them before the October 7 bombardment).

President Bush’s statement, however, was made hollow the next day by Attorney General Ashcroft’s announcement. He informed the country that whereas previously the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) could only hold an "alien that had been taken into custody because of a violation" for twenty-four hours, the new regulation would allow the INS to hold the ‘alien’ for "forty-eight hours, or to an additional reasonable time." In one swoop, the Justice Department revoked the right of habeas corpus for non-citizens of the US, and it allowed officers of the Law to turn any "violation" (not a guilty verdict) into an excuse for indefinite detention. Ashcroft’s rules, which will be challenged in federal court because they are against the US constitution, have made official the tenor of the unofficial attacks on west and south Asians.

THE BEST OF AMERICA

As US planes bomb Afghanistan, a section of the US public is emboldened by acts such as the one put forward by Ashcroft to continue the terrorism against west and south Asians in the US. But there are others who oppose this trend, and peace squads have been formed from Seattle to New York to protect places of worship and vulnerable populations. This comes alongside the anti-war movement that has been trying to buck the 93 per cent pro-war poll numbers that the media releases each day.

The Communist Party USA, in a message to its members on the day of the bombing, noted that

"the anti-war sentiment is much broader and bigger than the size of the demonstrations indicate; people oppose military action for different reasons, ranging from concern about terrorist reprisals, to the danger that a larger war will result, to the terrible fact that many innocent people will be killed by US bombs. All of these are reasons to call for peace."

And indeed, peace is the most radical slogan in contemporary USA. The domestic war aim may be to use the WTC attacks as a pretext for the increased repression of certain population groups, whether those of color, or those who dissent from the right-wing thrust in the US. But well-meaning people have begun to gather against these aims, and as the bombs fall on Afghanistan, one hopes that they will succeed.

October 8, 2001