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The Europeanization of American Racismor a New Racial Hybrid?: After September11Amrita BasuPublished online: 30 Nov 2010.

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Souls 4 (3): 31–38, 2002 / Copyright © 2002 The Trustees of Columbia Universityin the City of New York / 1099-9949/02 / DOI:10.1080/10999940290105282

I

The Europeanization of AmericanRacism or a New Racial Hybrid?

After September 11

Amrita Basu

Souls

Race and Globalization

n San Francisco, an Iraqi grocery store owner found TERRORIST GO HOME scrawled onhis storefront. Across the Atlantic, in northern England, AVENGE USA–KILL A MUSLIM

NOW was spray-painted on a mosque. In Arizona, U.S.A., a man shot and killed a Sikhgas station attendant, shouting, “I stand for America all the way!” In Dublin Ireland,many Sikhs were taunted, harassed, and attacked; at least three were killed. All theseincidents, provoked by the September 11 attacks on Washington D.C., New York City,and Shanksville, Pennsylvania, were directed at Arabs, Muslims, and those who weremistaken for them. Although the September 11 attacks were directed at the U.S., theracist attacks that followed were a transnational or at least trans-Western phenomenon.When it did occur in the U.S., this violence was unusual in that it did not target AfricanAmericans, Latinos, or Asian Americans.

Race and racism are of vital importance in considering the nature of the violence thatoccurred after September 11. In the U.S., as in other Western countries where there wasan anti-Muslim, anti-Arab backlash, the victims of the violence were people of color andthe perpetrators were white. I will argue, however, that the racism that America experi-enced was interlaced with xenophobic nationalism. Suspicion of Arabs and Muslimswas linked to a fear that their loyalties were pan-Arab or pan-Islamic and thus hostile toAmerican interests abroad. It was a form of racism more commonly seen outside theU.S. than within.

Transnational Backlash

It is impossible to speak of racism in isolation from nationalism and transnationalism.The nineteen hijackers who crashed into the World Trade Center were a highlytransnational group consisting of men from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates,Lebanon, and Egypt. Most had left their countries of origin to lead cosmopolitan lives in

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the West. The hijackers’ identities were both national and transnational. Osama BinLaden, for example, was a staunch nationalist, as evidenced by his anger at the station-ing of U.S. bases in Saudi Arabia. His loyalties, however, were also pan-Islamic andpan-national, as demonstrated by his support for Palestinian statehood. A common set ofbeliefs and principles, rather than any single ascribed characteristic, bound these men.Even religion is a poor guide to their views. True, the concept of jihad can be traced toIslam, but as the suicide bombers in the Palestinian, Tamil, and other ethnic secessionistmovements demonstrate, self-sacrifice for a cause is not the province of Islam. The mostimportant commonality among the so-called terrorists of September 11 was their com-mitment to the protection of Muslim and Arab interests from U.S. intervention and domi-nation. In this sense, the motivations behind the attack were much more political thancultural. Al Qaeda does not oppose the globalization of culture. It is a transnational, pan-Islamic, pan-Arab political movement.

This brief account of the identities of those who engaged in the violence of Septem-ber 11 is relevant to understanding the retaliatory violence that followed. The victims ofthe racist backlash, like the culprits, were of many different nationalities and religiousbackgrounds. They were attacked because they appeared to be Arab or Muslim, andthey were harassed, ostensibly, as punishment for the hijackers’ wrongs. Many Ameri-cans felt insecure and vulnerable when these global tensions crossed American borders,and many found scapegoats on which to vent their fears. National borders did not pro-vide security against attacks from without; nor did nationality provide evidence of people’sloyalties. Regardless of whether Arabs and Muslims were American citizens, their loy-alties immediately became suspect when those planes crashed into the Pentagon and theTwin Towers.

Estimates of the number of persons attacked and killed vary widely. At one end ofthe spectrum are estimates by the Muslim Public Affairs Council of Southern Californiaand the Council on American-Islamic Relations which identified close to eight hundredincidents of violence by October 11. The Council on American Islamic Relations re-ported more than five hundred hate crimes throughout the U.S. within ten days of theattacks. The Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee reported more than fourhundred violent attacks on Muslims, six of which were deadly.1 At another end of thespectrum, the Federal Bureau of Investigation reported only 145 hate-related crimes.2

This last estimate, however, is extremely unreliable because, to categorize an act as ahate crime, the FBI must establish that the motivation for the violence was hostilitytoward a victim’s race, religion, or national origin. Since those who engage in violencedo not usually announce their motivations, intentions are notoriously difficult to estab-

lish. Tracking systems for cases that are filed are alsoflawed. Law enforcement agencies are not requiredto report hate crimes to the federal government. Thusthe FBI’s estimates do not reflect reports by all thelaw enforcement agencies in the country.

Violence in the aftermath of September 11 wasnot confined to the U.S. It also occurred in Canada,Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, Holland, and Po-land. In each of these countries, the crimes playedout similarly: sloganeering, graffiti, harassment, bru-tality, and the desecration of mosques. In San Diego,Chicago, Cleveland, Seattle, and several Europeancities, mosques and Islamic centers were bombed.3

Graffiti such as ARABS GO HOME, and YOU’RE TERROR-ISTS appeared in many places. The attacks were often

Suspicion of Arabsand M us l ims waslinked to a fear thattheir loyalties werepan- A rab o r pan -Is lam ic and thushostile to Americaninterests abroad

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directed at men and women who looked foreign by virtue of their turbans, head scarves,or clothing. As a result, many mistakes were made: Sikhs, Lebanese, Pakistanis, Egyp-tians, and Bangladeshis were attacked. Some American Muslim organizations advisedtheir members to stay indoors or, if they ventured out, recommended that they dressinconspicuously and avoid discussing Middle East politics in public. The U.S. Sikh com-munity organized meetings, electronic mail discussion groups, and a Web site to addresshow Sikhs could protect themselves.

Lansing, Michigan, September 1993. Photo by Jim West

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34 w Souls Summer 2002

More pervasive than physical violence was an increased climate of hostility towardArab Americans in the U.S. According to a poll by the Arab American Institute, one infive Arab Americans said they had experienced discrimination since September 11. Forty-five percent of those interviewed reported knowing someone of Arab ethnicity who hadexperienced discrimination after the attacks.4

The State’s Response

These alarming shifts in racial, ethnic, and religious hostility underscore one of the mostnoteworthy features of anti-Arab bigotry: the extent to which it is responsive to mes-sages from law enforcement officials and state leaders. During periods of national crisis,people are especially apt to look to leaders for answers. Racist explanations by politicalleaders can spark racist responses within civil society.

In the aftermath of September 11, racial profiling took on a wholly different characterthan in the past. For many years, African Americans spoke of being pulled over for whathas become known as “driving while Black.” Today, a similarly common fear is “flyingwhile brown.” Citing national security concerns, the Justice Department claimed vastnew powers to detain suspects for extended periods and deny them contact with theirfamilies. Today, months after the attacks, it still refuses to divulge how many suspectsare being detained and for how long, and it has denied prisoners the right to counsel.

The most important commonality among the so-calledterrorists of September 11 was their commitment to theprotection of Muslim and Arab interests from U.S.intervention and domination

The attacks on civil liberties have also begun to impact issues of free speech andcultural expression. On numerous occasions, those who condemned the U.S. bombingof Afghanistan were censored—and in some cases fired—by universities, news organi-zations, and public officials. In the weeks after September 11, comedian Bill Maher,who hosts the late-night television talk show Politically Incorrect, said on-air that, con-trary to President George W. Bush’s statements, suicide bombers could not be calledcowardly. He added that the word more accurately described governments that launchedcruise missiles on small nations from hundreds of miles away. The comments madeheadlines, and Ari Fleischer, the White House press spokesman, roundly criticized Maher.He asked that, in future, the media censor themselves and others who would make suchcriticisms of the government. “The reminder to all Americans is that they need to watchwhat they say, watch what they do, and this is not a time for remarks like that.”5 Eightmonths later Maher’s show was canceled.

The Patriot’s Act grants law enforcement and intelligence agencies enormous powersof inquiry and investigation—and exempts these agencies from many constitutional re-strictions that protect citizens from undue government invasions into rights to privacyand dissent. The law allows for vastly expanded electronic surveillance, detaining immi-grants indefinitely without charges, and the seizure of property without judicial supervi-sion. Similarly, several European governments have introduced new legislation that threat-

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ens the human rights of their own citizens, immigrants, and refugees. Amnesty Interna-tional reported that efforts in several European countries to combat terrorism from abroadhas engendered a climate in which racism and xenophobia are flourishing. The Germangovernment has tightened immigration restrictions as a result of the September 11 at-tacks. In Britain, where the government announced new measures to crack down onillegal immigrants, the fight against terrorism is likely to prevent immigrants from find-ing asylum. The British government also has announced that it would give the courtspowers to indefinitely detain terrorist suspects from abroad. In Australia, new legisla-tion bars individuals who are not granted refugee status from appealing those decisionsin court.6

In the immediate aftermath of the attack, President Bush’s xenophobic references tothe forces of good versus evil and Islam versus Christianity clearly inflamed alreadytense race relations. Only later did he attempt to neutralize the impact of these state-ments. Fortunately, those attempts bore fruit. The fact that anti-Arab violence did notfurther escalate must also be attributed in part to the efforts of then-mayor of New YorkCity Rudolph Giuliani and U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell.

Neoracism in America?

An examination of post–September 11 anti-Arab violence reveals striking patterns ofrace and racism. That the victims all were brown-skinned people and the violence oc-curred in so many Western countries suggests that the perpetrators of violence felt acommon sense of racial identification. An analysis based on skin color alone, however,cannot explain the deeper associations between terrorism and immigration. Although ina few cases the attackers may have actually suspected that their victims had ties to terror-

Nablus, West Bank, 2001. Copyright © 2001 Iris Photo Collective/Clarence Williams III

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ist organizations, in most cases those who engaged in racial profiling, graffiti writing,sloganeering, and physical violence were treating their victims as symbols of all thingsforeign and thus menacing. The attack on the World Trade Center led many Americansto redraw in their cognitive maps the boundaries between Americans and non-Ameri-cans. George W. Bush boldly stated, “Either you are with us or against us,” and Marga-ret Thatcher emerged from retirement to challenge Muslim organizations in Britain toprove their loyalty.

Many Arab and Muslim organizations responded accordingly. “We condemn in thestrongest terms possible the use of terror to further any political or religious cause,”proclaimed a full-page Boston Globe ad signed by forty Muslim groups.7 Some Muslimorganizations in the U.S. organized their members to provide blood donations to victimsof the World Trade Center attack. W. Deen Muhammad, the leader of the Muslim Ameri-can Society, which has 2.5 million members and is the largest African-American Mus-lim group, condemned the terrorist attacks. Louis Farrakhan called the attacks vicious,atrocious, and an act of war, but also called on the U.S. government to reevaluate itspolicies based on corporate greed that are at the root of hatred directed at America.8

Despite these statements of loyalty, suspicions have continued to run high against Mus-lims and Arabs living in America—a pattern that highlights that neoracism may be onceagain taking root in the U.S.

In Race, Nation and Class, Etienne Balibar distinguishes between Anglo-Americanracism, and Western European neoracism.9 He argues that unlike eugenics-based, Dar-win-inspired racism that asserts that people of color are biologically inferior, neo-racismsprings from the insecurity of dominant groups as they interact with people whose val-ues threaten their beliefs and ways of life. Racism toward Arab and Muslim Americansis much more akin to neoracism than to its traditional Anglo-American variant.

Within the U.S., the closest historical parallel to this European form of racism wasduring World War II, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered the detention of120,000 Japanese Americans after Japan’s surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. Clearly, rac-ism was a factor. After all, German Americans—just as much America’s war enemies—were not interned, nor was their property confiscated by the government. The drivingforce behind the internment of Japanese Americans, however, was not racism based inpseudo-scientific Darwinian thinking about skin pigmentation so much as it was a re-flection of suspicions that Japanese Americans had stronger allegiances to Japan than tothe United States.

Similarly, modern-day anti-immigrant racism toward Chicanos in California and Texasstems from anxieties that these large waves of newcomers threaten established identi-ties, jobs, and life styles. The war against terrorism added a new dimension to estab-lished forms of anti-immigrant racism: a fear that, although certain immigrant groupshave assimilated culturally and economically, they still harbor deep resentments towardthe U.S.

Transnational Anti-Muslim Violence

Centered on issues of national versus religious loyalties, a repertoire of images and mean-ings associated with anti-Muslim violence is emerging transnationally. India’s experi-ences are instructive. Although India has an unusually long tradition of democracy andreligious pluralism, it has been home to extensive Hindu-Muslim violence, which hasespecially victimized members of the Muslim community. The most serious episodes ofviolence occurred in the early 1990s when Hindu nationalists demolished a sixteenth-century mosque in the northern Indian town of Ayodhya. The violence has been cycli-

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cal. Most recently, this February and March, Hindusreturning from a pilgrimage to Ayodhya were attackedin their train compartments, apparently by Muslims.Hindu nationalists organized retaliatory violenceagainst Muslims in Gujarat. Official reports claim thatsix hundred persons were killed, but reliable unoffi-cial estimates place the number closer to one thousand.

The Hindus attackers speak unrepentantly of theiractions, claiming that Indian Muslims are loyal to thelarger Muslim world—and to Pakistan specifically—but not to India. They ask: Why else would Muslimscheer for Pakistani teams during cricket games in whichthe two countries compete? Why else would they shieldtheir religious laws from state scrutiny? For the moremilitant Hindu nationalists, Muslims can demonstrate their loyalty to India by acceptingthe Hindu god Ram as their own and using the greeting “Jai Shri Ram” (Victory to theLord Ram). More moderate Hindu nationalists believe Muslims can demonstrate theirnationalism by accepting equal treatment under the law, which would mean rejectingspecial protections for Muslims as a minority community. Although on the face of it thisseems to be a reasonable demand, it disregards the vulnerabilities that a minority reli-gious community experiences in a predominantly Hindu society.

The parallel with the U.S. is twofold. First, as discussed above, the majority com-munity asks minorities to demonstrate their loyalties, with little prospect of acceptingtheir assurances. Victims of racist violence in the aftermath of September 11 couldno more prove their innocence than could Muslims during the riots that occurred inIndia between 1990 and 1993, and again this February and March. The Hindu mobs didnot stop before attacking Muslims to ask them about their beliefs. They attackedMuslims because they were Muslim. In India as in the U.S., bigotry toward Muslimsrepresents a combination of racism, based on the supposedly intrinsic negative qualitiesof the community, and prejudice based on the belief that Muslims form part of atransnational community to which they owe allegiance. Second, as noted earlier, in bothnations, racism takes its cues from state policies. In India the scale of Hindu-Muslimviolence far surpasses what America experienced post-September 11 because state com-plicity runs so much deeper. Through action or inaction, the state has played a crucialrole in determining whether or not a small spark will lead to a major conflagration. Afterreligious riots flared in Gujarat earlier this year, the state waited forty-eight hours torespond—a deliberate move that was largely responsible for the loss of almost a thou-sand lives.

The Road Ahead

As much as intellectuals, activists, and enlightened media commentators have sought todivorce the assumed links between Islam and terrorism, anti-Muslim sentiment in theU.S. long predates the events of September 11. This presents human rights activists witha major challenge. This challenge became clear in the campaign for increased women’srights in Afghanistan. The Feminist Majority campaign against so-called gender apart-heid in Afghanistan did a great deal to enlighten the global community about the oppres-sion of women under the Taliban, but it implied that Islam was at the root of women’ssuffering and that all forms of veiling were oppressive to women. The challenge fortransnational feminist groups today is to respect and collaborate with a range of groups

Racist explanationsby political leaderscan spark racist re-sponses within civilsociety.

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in Afghanistan and other parts of the Middle East, including those who may reject secu-larism and seek Islamic solutions to their problems.

The war against terrorism added new dimension toestablished forms of anti- immigrant racism

Recent events also raise some complicated questions about how Arab Americans canembrace the sides of their identity that fall on both sides of the hyphen. Although thereis a great danger that those Muslims and Arabs who evince support for Palestinians orcondemn U.S. foreign policy will be seen as anti-American, there are also some morehopeful possibilities. Both the events of September 11 and the subsequent violent back-lash against Arabs and Muslims prompted many Americans to educate themselves aboutIslam, the Israeli–Palestine conflict, and U.S. policies in the Middle East. The responseof several Muslim and Arab American leaders was also constructive: to condemn theattacks and distance themselves from the so-called terrorists while advising Arab Ameri-cans to defend their civil liberties and become more active in American politics. Somehave begun to play more active roles in influencing the American foreign-policy estab-lishment. For example, a group of fifteen prominent American Muslim leaders met withGeorge W. Bush at the White House on September 26 to counsel and debate him on hisadministration’s policies toward the Middle East. Many were convinced that Bush’ssubsequent use of less inflammatory, xenophobic language showed that he had heededtheir advice.10 Bush was seeking to create a broad-based American coalition to supportthe U.S.’s war in Afghanistan. Whatever his motivations, in recent months Americangoverning elites have evidenced a more nuanced understanding of Islam and MiddleEast politics. As some Americans have responded with xenophobic racism, there arealso the glimmerings of a more worldly, compassionate response.

Notes

1. Rene Sanchez, “Hate Crimes Against MuslimsNationwide Abate,” Washington Post, 26 Octo-ber 2001.

2. Beth Shuster, “U.S. Strikes Back; Tracking HateCrimes: Crimes of Hate or Just Crimes?,” LosAngeles Times, 11 October 2001.

3. Finlay Lewis (Copley News Service), “Presidenturges ‘respect’,” San Diego Union-Tribune, 18September 2001; Janita Poe, “Backlash target-ing innocent victims; Stereotyping alarms com-munities, police,” Atlantic Journal and Consti-tution, 19 September 2001.

4. The poll, which consisted of interviews with 508people, was conducted on October 6 through 8by Zogby International and reported in the Chi-cago Sun-Times 12 October, 2001.

5. Damon Johnston, “Loss of Liberties,” Queensland,Australia, Courier Mail, 6 October 2001.

6. Peter Ford, “Xenophobia Follows U.S. Terror,”The Christian Science Monitor, 11 October2001.

7. Jeff Jacoby, “Speaking Out Against Terror,” Bos-ton Globe, 23 September 2001.

8. John Fountain, “African American Muslims; Sad-ness and Fear as a Group Feels Doubly At Risk,”New York Times, 5 October 5 2001.

9. Etienne Balibar, “Is there a ‘Neo-Racism,’ in Race,Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, eds. EtienneBalibar and Immanuel Wallerstein (London:Verso, 1991).

10. Mary Rourke, “A Stronger Voice for Muslims,”Los Angeles Times, 29 October 2001.

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