Uncle Swami: South Asians in America Today

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Letter to Uncle Swami

Dear Uncle Swami,

It has been ten years since the planes crashed into your buildings. It was a shock to your system. You were not used to such things. It didn’t break your heart. It sharpened your rage. Like an exhausted dragon, you whipped your tail around, crashing into other buildings, these in far-off Kabul and Kandahar, Mazar-e-Sharif and Herat, later Baghdad and Basra, and your feet stomped on your own ground, crushing Balbir Singh Sodhi and Gurcharanjeet Singh Anand, Imran Tahir and Ahmed Abualeinen. These latter are just names, sitting patiently in your computer systems, either in mortuary registers or deportation files. The people behind them are shadows: you smiled at them when they served you your curries, and patted their backs when they delivered their assignments on time—but you didn’t really care about them, what they were made of, their moral compasses. Planes crash, people are smashed, here and there, there and here.

Please do not take my blunt words to heart, Uncle. You have been good to me. You have been good to many of us. But, why does my stomach still clench when someone with a badge approaches me, thinking in my churned head that my time has come, I am going to be led to a plane and sent back to where I came from? Is it because that badge has started stopping me more often these past ten years, asking me why I am where I am, where I am going, what I believe in? Who are these people with badges, Uncle, and why do they stare at me?

I have heartburn, Uncle. I will take to drink. I will take to drugs. I will take to watching TV, eating fast food, going into debt. I will not exfoliate, I will not eat salad, I will not read the newspaper. I cannot wear my head scarf, I cannot grow my beard, I cannot speak my name and allow its poetry to ring through the air.

You send American aid all around, throwing money and cheese at the world’s poor. Even that aid is money you have borrowed from others. Lords are thieves, whose theft is proper.

But, Uncle, there is no aid for us—all we want is your kindness, and a little decency.

Your obedient servant,

Vijay Prashad

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The Day Our Probation Ended

. . .the sons of the slums cuffed up on trumped charges,

’Cause we look different, talk different, labeled as Jihadists.

—Chee Malabar, Oblique Brown, 2006

Eleven days after 9/11, I was on the train to New York City. It was a Friday. I was teaching a class at New York University on immigration. I hadn’t been into the city since before the attacks. Trying to distract myself, I read Saskia Sassen’s Guests and Aliens. It was going to be one of the main books for our seminar. Along the way, I can’t remember where, a troop of policemen came through the cabin. The train was at a station. They asked various people to follow them onto the platform. I was among them. We were asked some basic questions and then told to get back on the train.

I’ve seen enough World War II films to know how I should feel. There was fear, and there was anxiety. Would I, like so many others, be sent off to a deportation detention center? News reports of such removals had begun to sneak around, like a fetid rumor, among South Asians and Muslims. A Sikh man had already been killed in Arizona. Mistaken identity was the order of the day. My conversation with the officer was brief; he asked me what I was reading. It seemed that even a nonconformist book, in English, was sufficient to prove my academic credentials. No disrespect to Sassen, but a dog-eared and marked-up copy of her book would hardly be in the hands of a terrorist!

But for others, that was wishful thinking. On October 29, Tariq Ali was detained at Munich’s airport—the offending article a slim volume in German of Karl Marx’s On Suicide. Tariq had the mayor of Munich vouch for him, and he was then released. As he wrote that day, It was a tiny enough scratch, but if untreated these can sometimes lead to gangrene.

Within minutes after the World Trade Center was hit, angry white men yelled obscenities and chased Amrik Singh Chawla of Brooklyn, New York, who had escaped from the towers, down the street. His only escape was to hide his turban in his briefcase; they had gone after him because of his turban. In Richmond, Queens, three white youth severely beat up a Sikh man; other men shot at two Sikh boys; and a white man began to yell at a Sikh man on the Northern State Parkway, You fucking Arab rag-head, you’re all going to die, we’re going to kill every one of you, as all four of those in his car gave the Sikh man the finger. Men got the brunt of these attacks, because men mainly wear turbans. Those turbans served to distinguish the evildoers. The government had not yet said anything about Osama bin Laden, who wears a turban, and yet ordinary Americans knew that the turban somehow signified the soldiers of terror. For this reason, Sikhs suffered the brunt of the early attacks after 9/11.

On September 14, outside a Manhattan meeting organized by the South Asian Journalists Association to discuss the hate crimes, a man who was taking his baby for a walk assaulted one of the Sikh participants. You Islamic mosquitoes should be killed, he yelled, a phrase captured by TV Asia. Manga Singh, a Sikh taxi driver, reported to the New York Taxi Workers Alliance 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. 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. Balbir Singh Sodhi, a worker at an all-night store, was shot to death in Mesa, Arizona, by a man who later told the police, I stand for America all the way.

Hours after Mr. Sodhi was found dead, an unknown assailant shot Waqar Hassan of Dallas, Texas. Mr. Hassan was at work as a store clerk at Mom’s Grocery when he was shot. Mosques were included with gurudwaras in the saturnalia of random violence, just as South and West Asians of all faiths became, along with Sikhs, targets of retaliation for 9/11. The bulk of the attacks took place against not only those who are of West and South Asian descent, but against small merchants and workers, those who work the lonely, long-hour jobs at kiosks or in taxis, and those who live in minority neighborhoods.

Many professionals do not identify with victims of hate crimes because they are so infrequently affected. They are most often inconvenienced by xenophobia, opting to exaggerate their newly minted American accents or adopting nicknames in quotes (Pradip Max Kothari) to avoid the awkwardness of parochial peoples’ hesitancy before their alien names. The events of 9/11 were a wake-up call. Mr. Ashraf Khan 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 other passengers. I had a first-class ticket, Mr. Khan told National Public Radio, as if this should have secured him against the post-9/11 panic. South Asian film stars (Kamal Hassan and Aamir Khan), businessmen (Vijay Mallya), and writers (Rohinton Mistry and Ahmed Rashid) had to leave aircraft. The fear set in among 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 United States. Many refused to leave their homes to go to work or to school, and many foreign students got on the first available plane back to their homelands.

Women faced hostility in different spaces, generally not as routine assaults by those emboldened to be vigilantes for 9/11. But there are also women who faced the crowd: Meera Kumar, on September 12, 2001, was removed from an Amtrak train in Boston; in Huntington, New York, an elderly drunk driver tried to run down a Pakistani woman, followed her into a store, and threatened to kill her because she was destroying my country; in Los Angeles, on September 13, 2001, an Iranian woman was punched in the eye by another woman who wanted to register her displeasure with those who look like terrorists; on September 15, 2001, when Kimberly Lowe, a Creek Native American, stopped her car in Tulsa, Oklahoma, to confront a group of white males who had yelled, Go back to your own country, they pinned her down and drove over her till she died.

She was mistaken for the wrong kind of Indian.

The turban has always provoked anxiety; the Sikhs who came to California in the nineteenth century were greeted with hostility. But the Sikhs didn’t take it lightly: I used to go to Maryville every Saturday, one man recounted in the 1920s. "One day a drunk ghora [white man] came out of a bar and motioned to me saying, ‘Come here, slave!’ I said I was no slave man. He told me that his race ruled India and America, too. All we were slaves. He came close to me and I hit him and got away fast." There was no such self-defense after 9/11. The U.S. media began to run stories of ordinary Muslims testifying against the 9/11 attacks. They stood before television cameras and condemned the terrorists. Their body language quivered. Anthropologist Jessica Falcone remarked how, after 9/11, the Sikh community in the Washington, D.C., area bent over backward to prove its patriotism. A Washington Post journalist visited a Sikh community leader, who told her, We condemn harassment, we condemn terrorism. We are American, and we fully support the Bush administration. One of his nephews had just been shot at because of his turban. We are united as Sikhs, he told the reporter, and as Americans. Meanwhile, up in New York City’s Washington Heights, I saw white men with small U.S. flags make the rounds of the immigrant-owned small grocery stores. They banged these flags, which retailed at about $1 each, on counters and said things like Aren’t you going to be a patriot and buy this flag? The flags cost the immigrant workers $5 each, but they were far too scared to refuse. The test of loyalty provided a business opportunity for the young white men, and it forced the small shops to fly as many flags as possible. Patriotism is not, in this instance, the refuge of scoundrels. It is an act of desperation.

In a comprehensive review of over a thousand hate attacks on Arabs and desis, Human Rights Watch noted, This violence was directed at people solely because they shared or were perceived as sharing the national background or religion of the hijackers and al-Qaeda members deemed responsible for attacking the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The report is well titled We Are Not the Enemy: Hate Crimes Against Arabs, Muslims, and Those Perceived to Be Arab or Muslim After September 11. A report from the South Asian American Leaders for Tomorrow found that in the week after 9/11, the U.S. media reported 645 bias incidents directed toward Americans perceived to be of Middle Eastern descent. The irony in all this was that among the hijackers none were from South Asia. They were Saudis and Egyptians, and seemed to have spent most of their time in Europe, with only a brief detour in Afghanistan. Anthropological and geopolitical distinctions seemed to make no difference. It was sufficient if you resembled a terrorist: olive skin, turbans, head scarves, facial hair, and other such tokens were the markers of danger. It is why Sikh men came into the dragnet early; Osama bin Laden also wore a turban. None of the hijackers wore a turban, or had other outward signs of religiosity. A terrorist does not announce himself or herself. That would defeat the purpose. But the visual sign is precisely what the racist would like to focus on, exactly what the terrorist would like to deny. The bodies of so many are stripped bare by this contradiction.

TWICE-BORN GENERATION

My brother moved to California in the 1980s, and I followed along in his train. He worked in San Leandro, a town devoted to the maintenance of cars and car culture. On the weekend, the Indian American community would gather in each other’s homes. The people in the room were warm and friendly to each other, with the men in one room, the women in another, and the children in the basement or the den, with their home friends. I was too old to be with the kids, most of whom were born in the United States, and too young to mingle with the adults. That curious age allows one to wander between sets.

I remain enthralled by two facts about these adults:

1. They were also highly educated men and women, who held various kinds of professional jobs in their new country. Not more than a decade in their new land, they had already attained positions of prominence in their fields—not as leaders, to be sure, but as accomplished technicians (as doctors, engineers, scientists, and even in the less sure world of midrange business).

2. They had almost no interest in politics or in the issues of the day. No one much liked Reagan, but that seemed largely a temperamental thing—his casualness seemed inappropriate for a world leader. If the discussion turned to politics, it was most often about India, and here too the trend seemed staged: either nostalgia for the kind of political talk of their college days, or animosity for this or that policy of the government (the textbook was India West and India Abroad, the newspapers of record for the Indian American community).

Occasionally there was a bit of guilt about leaving India behind, to be part of the brain drain; this led to the very rare bout of collective charity (to raise money for this or that orphanage, or school of the blind, or earthquake relief—all based in India). Nearby Oakland burned with the futility of the modern world, but it would only come into our conversation if talk turned to the vegetables to be found at its Chinatown.

Nothing of this should be a surprise. The middle class seeks convenience, and is loath to turn to politics when it might inconvenience one’s daily life or one’s sense of moral equilibrium. That’s a universally enforced silence. Nor should it come as a surprise that the migrants who have come into the United States after 1965 have no well-developed social obligation to the struggles that enabled them to have such success. The road to Indian America was paved by the toil of others, now barely acknowledged. Born in the 1940s and 1950s, this generation of middle-class Indians missed the freedom struggle. Some of them would have had parents or grandparents in the fight, but they did not lift the cudgels for their homeland. When they went to school and college, now funded by the hard labor of their co-citizens in the new nation, they did not feel the weight of subordination and exclusion. It was a privilege to breathe the air of freedom, and to feel a part of a new dawn. That is the first birth of those who would become Indian Americans.

Their second birth is equal to the first. The United States barred Indians from entry into the country between 1924 and 1965. The law changed in 1965 as a result of the United States’ fear that the USSR might overtake it in the science, technology, and arms race (the Soviet-launched satellite, Sputnik, in 1957 sent fear into the spinal cord of the nation). The new immigration law allowed migrants to enter if they brought with them special technical and scientific skills, as well as medical degrees (to help staff the expanded Medicare system, also in operation from the mid-1960s). This was the reason I was surrounded by doctors and engineers on those Friday nights. But the story is not complete yet. The immigration act also came alongside two landmark laws, the Civil Rights Act (1964) and the Voting Rights Act (1965). At least two generations of people sacrificed their lives and longings to overturn the injustice of Jim Crow. Because of them, the new migrants who