Last week we saw yet another hate crime
viciously interrupt the everyday business of a world trying to come to
grips with its own diversity.
On the morning of December 27, 2012, Erika Menendez pushed Sunando Sen in
front of a 7 train in Queens, New York, USA. She told the police: “I pushed a Muslim
off the train tracks because I hate Hindus and Muslims ever since 2001
when they put down the twin towers I’ve been beating them up.”
A native of India, Mr. Sen had saved enough money to open a small
copy shop. While he had no family in the U.S., he had friends and
associates who were part of this new life. While he was a Hindu, Sen had
a Muslim roommate with whom he frequently discussed matters of belief.
And when they did, Mr. Sen expressed his deep disappointment that there
was so much violence in the world on account of religion.
No matter Ms. Menendez’ psychiatric state, her hate crime is based on
a conflation of religious and racial identities: while Sen’s religion
(Hindu or Muslim) was the motivation, his racial make-up was the
deciding factor for the murder.
This confusion is nothing new among haters. Wade Michael Page, the
gunman in Oak Creek Wisconsin who began his white supremacist career in
the Neo-Nazi underground at Fort Bragg, had a particular hatred for Jews
and blacks, in addition to the “dirt people” who made up all non-white
groups. And we have heard about the post 9-11 attacks on Sikhs as “rag
heads” from the Middle East.
But as Jack Mirkinson noted
in HuffPo in the wake of the Oak Creek shooting at the local gurdwara, even news reporters
have a hard time getting a “lesser-known” religious tradition right:
A Fox News analyst asked if there had been any “anti-Semitic acts” in
the past against Sikhs; CNN’s Don Lemon wondered if Sikhs have
“traditional enemies,” or if the shooter had a “beef with the Sikhs”; a
local Wisconsin station reported that the religion is “based in northern
Italy.”
Corrective guidelines were immediately issued by the Asian American Journalists’ Association. But the damage was done.
However the media handle it, scholars of religion have long argued
that religious literacy -- knowing who is who -- is intimately connected to
tolerance of religious diversity, to a climate in which the stranger no
longer seems strange. We are not talking about ideal harmony here; just a
way of living together in which diversity becomes nothing special,
simply a fact of our lives.
Yet simply rushing to correct a confusion, or conflation, has a
downside. For Hindu groups to say they are not Muslims, or Sikh groups
to say they should not be confused with Jews, implies that if the
attacker had just gotten the religion right in the attack, all would be
well.
Recall the debate after 9/11 about the fact that Sikhs should not be
confused with Muslims, and whether such clarifying statements would
actually help or hurt the fight against religious prejudice. In an
insightful essay Sikh-American Simran Jeet Singh also points out some of the other problems with the theme of “mistaken identity”:
"A number of people have challenged the moniker of “mistaken identity”
on different grounds. Some have problematized the notion because it
implies the “correctness” of targeting Muslims. Some have suggested that
a neo-Nazi and white supremacist would not care to distinguish between
Muslims and Sikhs. Others have argued that Sikhs fit into the new
racialized identity of Muslims and that the targeting of such minority
groups is completely intentional."
On the one hand, members of a wrongly targeted minority should
clarify and teach about their traditions, preferably, as I have written before,
in alliance with others who are not part of the tradition. On the other
hand, Simran Jeet Singh and others argue against the idea that education alone will
cure violence. It is unlikely that a course in comparative religion
would have prevented the Oak Creek shooter or Erika Menendez from
murdering innocent people going about their daily lives.
What is necessary, then, is a two-pronged approach. In the first
case, we can and should clarify religious racial and ethnic identities
as a matter of course. Education must continue. But we should not delude
ourselves into thinking that education is enough.
A second focus is necessary: we might view such confusions of
identity as opportunities to make common cause with other victims of
hate crimes in America. The fact that Erika Menendez included both
Hindus and Muslims in her rage means that both groups continue to be
vulnerable in the United States. The fact that Sen’s brown skin was the
single cause of his being targeted means that religious minorities must
continue to make common cause with racial minorities. The fact that Wade
Michael Page included Sikhs in his murderous rampage, when his
“preferred” white supremacist targets were black and Jews means that
Sikhs, blacks, and Jews remain linked in the white supremacist
imagination.
Last week’s tragedy is a stark reminder that when it comes to hate
crimes, religious minorities continue to be confused with each other -- and
they continue to be racialized. Just as racial and ethnic minorities
continue to be “religion-ized.”
These post-9/11 hate crimes provide us a particularly twenty-first
century reason for the creation of coalitions across racial and ethnic
and religious lines.
