Inventing Enemies
The motivation behind the attacks on
Indian Americans is a combination of
seeing South Asians as terrorists
and Indians as usurpers of high-tech
jobs.
By Vijay Prashad
March 24, 2017 "Information
Clearing House"
- On February 22, Adam Purinton of
Olathe, Kansas, was at Austin’s Bar
and Grill. He saw two men, both from
India, and began to argue with them.
“Get out of my country,” Purinton
said to the two men, Srinivas
Kuchibhotla, 32, and Alok Madasani,
32, both tech workers at the
multinational technology firm Garmin.
Purinton began to yell racist slurs
at the men, got out his gun and
began to shoot. A bystander, Ian
Grillot, rose from his hiding place
to catch the gunman. He was then
shot through his chest and hand.
Kuchibhotla died, while Madasani
survived his wounds. Grillot, one of
whose vertebrae was fractured, also
survived. “I was just doing what
anyone should have done for another
human being,” he said from his
hospital bed.
A week later, on March 2, Harnish
Patel, 43, a businessman, was shot
dead just outside his house in the
quiet town of Lancaster, South
Carolina. Patel ran a Speed Mart—a
convenience store that was popular
in his area—and was known as a
popular employer as well as a kind
man. While the Federal Bureau of
Investigation has decided to
investigate the Kuchibhotla killing
as a hate crime, Lancaster County
Sheriff Barry Faile said: “I don’t
have any reason to believe that this
[the killing of Patel] was racially
motivated.”
The next day, on March 3, Deep Rai
was working on his car in the
driveway of his house in the East
Hill neighbourhood of the Seattle
suburb of Kent, Washington. A white
man wearing a mask confronted Rai, a
Sikh who wears a turban, and said:
“Go back to your own country.” Then
he shot Rai in the arm. Rai survived
the attack. Kent Police Chief Ken
Thomas said that his department was
taking the attack very seriously.
The theme of “get out of my country”
or “go back to your own country” is
central to these attacks. A new
website by Asian Americans Advancing
Justice (AAAJ) asks people to report
hate crimes (standagainsthatred.org).
The impetus for this website was the
attacks on East Asian Americans as a
consequence of Donald Trump’s
anti-China rhetoric, Karin Wang of
AAAJ said. “It is reminiscent of the
1980s when Japan was portrayed as
the economic enemy,” Karin Wang
noted. Japan was seen at the time as
a threat to the United States auto
industry. Now China is depicted as a
thief of U.S. jobs.
It is not the anti-China rhetoric
that drives the attacks on Indian
Americans. What motivates them is a
combination of seeing Indians as
terrorists and of seeing Indians as
usurpers of high-tech jobs.
Kuchibhotla, Patel and Rai are not
the first to be assaulted in this
way, nor will they be the last.
After 9/11, many Sikhs were shot or
beaten because the turban they wore
was identified with the turban worn
by Osama Bin Laden. In 2012, Wade
Michael Page went into a gurdwara in
Oak Creek, Wisconsin, and shot dead
six people and wounded four others.
He came to start a “racial holy
war”.
The sewer of white supremacy that
produced Page and Purinton does not
distinguish between Iranians and
Indians, Sikhs and Muslims. It reeks
of resentment and hatred, bilious
political anger of the most
dangerous kind.
Who is a terrorist?
Purinton suggested that he had
killed two Iranians or “Middle
Easterners”. It is no point saying
that Indian Americans are neither
Iranians nor “Middle Easterners”. To
Purinton, these men were Iranian. It
is enough that he believed it. His
gun was more important than their
denials.
Hollywood has made it a habit to
hire South Asians to play
“terrorists”. The role Aasif Mandvi
(born in Mumbai) played in The
Siege (1998) defined the
terrorist as South Asian looking.
Last year, Riz Ahmed, the
British-born child of Pakistani
parents, wrote a powerful essay on
his experience as an actor. Called
“Typecast as a Terrorist”, the essay
lays out Ahmed’s struggle to find
roles outside the stereotype and of
his experiences at the U.S.
immigration counter. “As a minority,
no sooner do you learn to polish and
cherish one chip on your shoulder
than it’s taken off you and swapped
for another,” wrote Ahmed. “The
jewellery of your struggles is
forever on loan, like the Koh-i-Noor
diamond in the crown jewels. You are
intermittently handed a necklace of
labels to hang around your neck,
neither of your choosing nor making,
both constricting and decorative.”
The point is never whether one is or
is not an “Arab” or a “terrorist”
but that one resembles an “Arab” or
a “terrorist” in the imagination of
a racist. Stereotypes become
reality; hatred short-circuits
rationality. It is infantile to yell
“I am not an Arab” or “I am not a
racist”. People like Purinton and
Page do not care about such denials.
They see what they want to see. The
litmus test for them is the brown
skin. It glistens with the word
“terrorist”.
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President Donald Trump’s special
adviser Steve Bannon has long
disparaged South Asian high-tech
workers such as Kuchibhotla and
Madasani. In 2015, Bannon
interviewed candidate Trump on the
Breitbart News Daily radio show.
Bannon suggested that there were far
too many Asians in the high-tech
industry in the U.S. and that
perhaps there should be barriers
placed on their entry. The H-1B
visa, which allows high-tech workers
to enter the U.S., is a particular
grouse of Bannon’s. Trump expressed
doubts about Bannon’s extreme views:
“We have to be careful of that,
Steve,” Trump said. “You know,” he
continued, “we have to keep our
talented people in this country.”
Bannon would have none of it. “When
two-thirds or three-quarters of the
CEOs in Silicon Valley are from
South Asia or from Asia, I think…,”
he said, then hesitated. “A country
is more than an economy,” Bannon
said. “We’re a civic society.”
By “civic society”, Bannon meant
that the first priority of the U.S.
should be to its own “native”
citizens. In other words, white
Americans need to be the first in
the queue for the benefits of the
country. In March 2016, Trump
absorbed Bannon’s position. “The
H-1B programme,” Trump said, “is
neither high-skilled nor
immigration: these are temporary
foreign workers, imported from
abroad, for the explicit purpose of
substituting for American workers at
lower pay. I will end forever the
use of the H-1B as a cheap labour
programme and institute an absolute
requirement to hire American workers
first.” When the term “American
workers” is used, people like
Purinton and Page hear “white
workers”. It is what they signal
when they yell: “Go back to your
country.”
In another radio show, in April
2016, Bannon said that the migrants
to the U.S. “are not Jeffersonian
democrats”. “These are not people
with thousands of years of democracy
in their DNA coming here,” he said.
The idea of democracy in the DNA
could only imply that certain
“races” have democracy under their
skin and that Asians are not in that
company.
An idiosyncratic group in Ohio, Save
American Information Technology
Jobs, hounds Indian Americans in
public places to document their
lives. The group produced a document
on “Indian guest workers in the
Great Midwest”, which shows Indians
in parks and outside their homes.
The author is flabbergasted by the
increase in the number of Indians in
the area. “Displacement of Americans
has occurred,” notes the report,
“and Indians with various visa
documents in hand have become part
of the landscape.” The report drips
with resentment and anger. The hand
that holds the iPhone camera to
produce this report shares the same
motivation of the men with the guns
who shot the Indian Americans. Both
hands are not far either from the
opinions of Trump’s adviser Bannon.
Kuchibhotla’s wife, Sunayana Dumala,
wrote a moving Facebook post on
February 28. At the end of her note,
she asked: “the question that is in
every immigrant’s mind—DO WE BELONG
HERE? Is this the same country we
dreamed of and is it still secure to
raise our families and children
here?” Sunayana Dumala does not
answer her question. There is no
answer from her.
Copyright © 2017, Frontline.
This article was first published at
Frontline
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