Source: The Guardian

By Arjun Sethi

I remember feeling scared after 9/11. A few days after the attacks, a classmate jumped in front of my car and menacingly yelled “go home”. When I looked out the window, everyone turned away. Around the same time, a McDonald’s cashier nearly refused to sell my dad a cheeseburger. He eventually got the burger, but had lost his appetite.

But my family got off easy. In the days and weeks following the attack, many religious and ethnic minorities were bullied, harassed and assaulted. On 15 September 2001, Balbir Singh Sodhi, a Sikh American, was murdered in a violent hate crime in Mesa, Arizona.

I always thought things would get better. I was born and raised in Virginia, played soccer as a kid and went to high school football games with my friends. Apart from my Sikh articles of faith, a turban and beard, I didn’t feel too different from my peers. America was my home.

But 15 years later, I feel worse than I did then. Profiling, hate violence and bigotry now braid through the daily lives of Muslim, Arab, Sikh and South Asian Americans. We are outsiders looking in, forever struggling for equality and understanding.

Black parents know the feeling. They’ve long told their children that they’re different and will experience inequities and discrimination in almost every corner of American life. “The talk” can mean the difference between freedom and incarceration, life and death.

We now have our own talk with our kids.

It begins with profiling. Guidelines released by the justice department in 2014explicitly permit profiling at airports and borders. The guidance likewise permitsmassive data gathering operations, including the monitoring of communities through video surveillance and confidential informants, absent any kind of suspicion. It’s hard to tell our children that we’re equal when we can be stopped by law enforcement officials because of our turbans, hijabs or the color of our skin.

Read more