On Sunday, my wife and I were having a quiet brunch with friends at home in Pennsylvania when the phone started ringing. First my parents called from their home in Maryland. Then a cousin called from India. “Have you seen what's on CNN? There's been a shooting at a gurdwara in Wisconsin…†I felt a familiar emptiness. I had felt the same way after the morning of September 11, 2001.
Then, as now, Sikhs in the United States faced a common problem: many Americans presume that all men in turbans are Muslims. Just a few days after 9/11, a man named Balbir Singh Sodhi was shot down in Arizona in just such a case of mistaken religious identity. Other attacks followed in the coming months. Many Sikhs initially reacted with a blend of bewilderment and outrage at the seeming injustice. And yet that response - “we didn't do anything, we don't deserve this†- was not adequate, even if understandable. No community “deserves⠀ this type of hostility. Would it be any less tragic if the victims in Wisconsin had been Muslims gathering for Friday prayers?
On Monday, the shooter in Wisconsin was identified as Wade Michael Page, a U.S. Army veteran reportedly associated with white supremacist groups. Surely more details and clarity on the shooter's motives will emerge in the days to come, but at this point it seems reasonable to assume that he targeted Sikhs because they looked like enemies of his own twisted version of the American ideal.
In the fall of 2001, I had just started a new job as an assistant professor in the English department at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. In the weeks after the terrorist attacks, I felt intense hostility whenever I was away from the protected space of the college campus. The hostility wasn't simply a matter of small-town xenophobia; that fall, I also heard ugly taunts and insults, some threatening violence, on the streets of Philadelphia and even in New York. I felt spooked, and like many other Sikhs I put a bumper sticker on my car with a U.S. flag that announced me as a “Sikh American.†About a year later, everyone started to calm down and I put my feelings from that first year behind me. (And yes, I eventually took the bumper sticker off the car.)
To its credit, the Sikh community realized very quickly that it wouldn't do to simply say, “Don't hate me, I'm not a Muslim.†Sikhs got organized shortly after 9/11, forming advocacy organizations, chief among them the Sikh Coalition. These groups were emphatic that they opposed hate crimes directed against any group based on religious hostility. To spread awareness, Sikh groups also distributed educational materials and bought advertisements to try to reduce ignorance about the Sikh turban.
In light of the Wisconsin shooting, many Sikhs are now suggesting that we renew our educational efforts about Sikhs and Sikh ism. These are well-meaning and valuable efforts, but here's the thing: I am not sure that the shooter would have acted any differently even if he had known the difference.
As I have experienced it, the Sikh turban reflects a form of difference that can provoke some Americans to react quite viscerally. Yes, ignorance plays a part and probably amplifies that reaction. But it may also be that visible marks of religious difference like the Sikh turban are lightning rods for this hostility in ways that don't depend on accurate recognition.
I am not sure why the reaction can be so visceral - perhaps because wearing a turban is at once so intimately personal and so public? Walking around Philadelphia waving, say, an Iranian flag probably wouldn't provoke quite the same reaction. A flag is abstract - a turban, as something worn on the body, is much more concrete and it therefore poses a more palpable symbol for angry young men looking for someone to target. Whether or n ot that target was actually the “right one†was beside the point for the Oak Creek shooter.
I am by no means suggesting Sikhs not wear turbans to avoid hostility. But I also don't think we should fool ourselves that all hostility will be resolved purely by education, nor should we presume that this shooter suffered only from ignorance. As a white supremacist, it seems safe to suppose, what mattered to the shooter was that he hated difference - and saw, in the Sikh gurdwara at Oak Creek, a target for that hatred.
I am at a loss right now as to how to understand this tragedy, or how I might explain it to my 5-year old son (we haven't told him about it and don't plan to). I was born in Queens, after my parents joined a wave of South Asian doctors who came to the United States after immigration laws were reformed in 1965. They initially planned to return to India but decided that the economic opportunities would be better for them in America.
At times, li ving in the United States has seemed like an amazing privilege for my family. This year, we were out waving our little American flags with the rest of the neighborhood during the July 4th parade in our suburban Philadelphia town. And yet a senseless event such as this one reminds one how awfully precarious the American dream can be. Perhaps my son will have to learn that lesson, as I did in the weeks after 9/11 more than a decade ago. But I hope, for his sake, that the moment doesn't come too soon.
Amardeep Singh is an associate professor of English at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.
