This week's better long form stories help us make sense of the deeper cultural issues behind Sunday's Sikh Temple shooting, as well as the immigrant experience in America.
Between two worlds
The shooting at a Sikh Temple in the Wisconsin town of Oak Creek last Sunday revealed an ugly side to America?s pluralistic society. In a country of immigrants, there are still people who hate or fear those they see as ?outsiders,? and when those people have access to semi-automatic weapons, they can put their fear and hatred into action.
Skip to next paragraphRecent posts
' +
google_ads[0].line2 + '
' +
google_ads[0].line3 + '
Subscribe Today to the Monitor
The shooter, a former US Army soldier named Wade Michael Page, was a white supremacist, and before he was gunned down by a police officer, Page managed to kill six of the temple?s worshipers and to wound another police officer.
The incident is being treated as a domestic terror incident, with Page?s embrace of the ?racial holy war? rhetoric of the far right making this more than just another case of American mass murder. But the shock of the event also hit many Americans at another level. Here, the terrorist was white, and a former US soldier. His victims were Asian. The terrorist?s ideology, white supremacy, was every bit as hateful and destructive as the religious holy war (jihad) of the men who hijacked the planes on Sept. 11.
Sept. 11, of course, is the day that changed America forever. Many Americans began to view the outside world (and particularly the Islamic world) as a threat. But what about those Americans who were themselves Asian or Muslim? Jaswinder Bolina addresses this question beautifully in an essay, ?Empathy with the devil,? in The State, a print journal based in Dubai. As an American of Asian descent, Mr. Bolina finds himself torn between two worlds, and while he shares no actual sympathy for the goals of radical extremists, he understands implicitly what those goals are and where the motivations come from.
Recalling a conversation with an immigrant, shortly after 9/11, Bolina writes, ?He knows that he and I better resemble photographs of the hijackers than photographs of the firefighters. And when he says, ?they treated us like dogs,??us?means the Indian conflated with the Pakistani, the Pakistani mistaken for the Afghan, the Afghan called an Arab, the Arab indistinguishable from the Persian and the Turk, the Shia and the Sunni and the Sikh all taken for one bearded and turbaned body.?
The American dream
Shervin Malekzadeh, an Iranian-American immigrant and visiting assistant professor at Swarthmore College, makes a different point about an immigrant?s life in America. In an article in the Atlantic, marking the recent death of actor Sherman Helmsley, Mr. Malekzadeh, television was the tool for learning about America, and the 1970s comedy hit, ?The Jeffersons? was the show that came closest to identifying the challenges of being an immigrant.
Making it in America, making it in terms of the American dream, was compromised for George and Louise by their loss, and it was here that?The Jeffersons?showed us where the American and immigrant experiences converged. Because of who they were, and where they came from, the Jeffersons could never feel like they fully belonged in tony Upper East Side, or what my father liked to refer to as?Grey Poupon?society. The past pulled on them, and although?neither?ever?forgot?where they came from, the longer George and Louise stayed away from the old neighborhood the less they knew of their old selves.
ncaa tournament marchmadness mike d antoni nba trade rumors 2012 ncaa tournament schedule laurent robinson dantoni
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.