Profiling Creates Easy Targets for Hate Crimes
By Prabhjot Singh& Mallika Kaur
29 September, 2012
Countercurrents.org
Eleven years ago, on September 15, Balbir Singh Sodhi was shot and killed at his Phoenix gas station, in the first post-9/11 hate motivated death, but not by far the last—evidenced by last month's murders at a gurdwara in Wisconsin . These acts of violence rightfully drew immediate national sympathy and support. But such responses, no matter how heartfelt, merely mark time between one spectacle and the next.
We must end the everyday spectacles that reinforce the “other” as the easy scapegoat for violent anger. The TSA checkpoint immediately comes to our mind.
As a Sikh American couple, and frequent air travelers, we experience being segregated, as well as separated, each time we travel. The non-turban wearing woman is asked to “move ahead,” while the turbaned and bearded man is subjected to additional screening simply because of his turban.
Meanwhile, the peering eyes of fellow passengers wonder what is going on. Or worse still, show growing understanding that the turbaned guy must be stopped and checked again, and again. His status is confirmed as the “other.” It was the same “other” that Roque killed in Phoenix and Wade gunned down in Wisconsin.
Certainly, crimes such as the Phoenix or Wisconsin murders result from the confluence of several different factors: ignorance, manipulation, psychological imbalance, economic strain, etc. But they also share one constant: the readily available “other,” the convenient outlet for murderous anger.
Responding to the danger of creating a false sense of comfort at the cost of some Americans' basic civil rights (and thus making all Americans unsafe) California passed landmark civil rights legislation, Workplace Religious Freedom Act ( AB 1964), this Saturday . The law prohibits segregation and strengthens the legal standard for religious accommodations in the workplace. Effectively, AB 1964 outlaws any employer sending any worker who doesn't “look the part” to the back of the store and thus conveying a dangerous message to all other workers and observers.
The TSA however continues creating “others” every day, at the over 450 airports in the United States. S ince 2007, the Sikh Coalition, the largest Sikh civil rights organization in America, has gathered reports from Sikh travelers and issued report cards to the TSA demonstrating how Sikh travelers are routinely and unfairly secondarily screened .
This unintelligent screening policy is based on arguments that have failed repeatedly. While the TSA was busy arbitrarily deeming turbans as “bulky clothing” requiring “secondary screening,” a terror plot was unsuccessfully attempted in the Christmas day bomber's underwear .
Sikh Americans, including at the Sikh Coalition, were vindicated in their arguments that undergarments or pants have more room than turbans to hide the improvised explosive devices (IEDs) the TSA seeks to uncover through additional screening of “headgear.” Unfortunately, even today Americans who fit the mold of the “other” continue to be stopped, delayed, and held back for ‘special' procedures, while others wearing bulky sweatshirts and flowing skirts generally cruise by.
Every time a person with religious headdress—a Muslim hijab (headscarf), or a Sikh dastaar (turban) or chunni or patka (small scarf worn by many Sikh women)— is asked to step aside, the nation's scarce resources are squandered and Americans are made more insecure. Because while ethnic and religious profiling is clearly against core American values, it is also ineffective. Experts argue that profiling is dangerous because it provides terrorists a pattern that they can exploit to their advantage.
Policies targeting minorities through racial profiling—whether suspecting an African American Harvard scholar of burglary while entering his own home, or assuming a Sikh or a person of Middle Eastern descent is more likely to conceal explosives—do not provide real security; they at best provide a false sense of safety. The fact is, if turbans were worn by a large number of Americans, they would probably be given the same consideration as given to trousers at the TSA checkpoint. The TSA must stop contributing an environment where some Americans are painted as the “other” and become easy targets of anger and hate.
Prabhjot Singh, co-founder of the Sikh Coalition, currently serves on the Board of Directors. Mallika Kaur (JD/MPP, Berkeley/Harvard) is a social justice attorney. They reside in the Bay Area, California.
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