The first time I experienced the kind of racism that I’d left the UK to escape was the evening after 9/11, when young men threw a beer can at me and a few choice slurs from their truck as I walked down the street in Ithaca, NY.
I’ll admit to having underestimated the psychic shock of the attacks, having grown up in the UK where the IRA were a part of everyday life, where almost everyone in London had a story of walking past the bin that, an hour later, blew up. I wasn’t ready for the speed at which brown bodies would transform from model minority/Apu Nahasapeemapetilon status to the target of sustained physical assault. It took minutes.
Today, on the 25th anniversary of those attacks, the backlash is being papered over. I was mortified to see this in the New York Post, as if the thousands of people swept up, beaten, and sometimes killed, in the Islamophobic campaigns after 9/11 were not also innocent.
SAALT, South Asian Americans Leading Together, put together a report - American Backlash, which lives on here:
This came my way courtesy of an activist who didn’t want their name shared precisely because of the Hindu- and white-supremacist backlash today. (The Hindu part isn't a typo. Hindutva groups in the US drew a lesson of their own from the backlash, not that brown people had been beaten but that the wrong ones had, and set about getting Hindus counted with Israel and the United States as fellow targets of Islamist terror rather than with Muslims and Sikhs as fellow targets of racism.)
The SAALT report was a volunteer effort, so the finding of 645 incidents is definitely a lower bound. The New York Post’s complaint is that anyone should still bother counting, offering a casual Islamophobia on the same spectrum as the vitriol directed at Muslim communities in the US that results, in some cases, in direct violence. Here in Texas, for some it’s worse than after 9/11. Islamophobia is core part of a Republican Party political strategy to bring out the vote, (though let’s not pretend the Democratic Party’s showering itself with glory).