In the weeks after 9/11, the white supremacist Mark Stroman shot and killed a store clerk from Pakistan, blinded a clerk from Bangladesh, and then, saying “God Bless America,” murdered Vasudev Patel, an Indian immigrant.1 These were not random acts of violence. Mistaken as being of Middle Eastern descent, many South Asian Americans/immigrants, along with Arab Americans/immigrants, became targets of verbal and physical assault, victims of racists avenging the assault on America. Sikhs who sported beards and turbans became especially vulnerable to hate crimes.2 South Asian immigrant merchants took to placing American flags in their stores. Some South Asian men shaved their beards, while Muslim women were advised to stay indoors. For South Asian Americans/immigrants, the state of siege that had gripped the nation in the aftermath of the events of 9/11 took on a darker significance. Although several of the World Trade Center victims had been of South Asian descent, South Asian Americans/ immigrants realized very soon that 9/11 was being scripted primarily as a Euro-American and Christian trauma. Any sense of collective grief and rage in which South Asian Americans shared the horror of the burning twin towers with the “American people” was preempted by the racial coding of 9/11. In the ruins of a smoking ground zero loomed the specter of the grotesque figure of the Muslim Arab terrorist.
