9/11 Sharpens Racial Identification
NEW YORK — Vivek Wadhwa had never thought about race in the 20 years he lived in the United States — until the post-Sept. 11 backlash against people who looked as if they might be from the same part of the world as the hijackers.
Worried about his wife and children, the Indian-born technology executive began speaking out, and his sense of racial identity took shape.
“I couldn’t have cared less about race before Sept. 11,” said Wadhwa, who is from Cary, N.C. But after the attacks, when he and others in his community were regarded with suspicion, “it was something I had to be aware of.”
The spotlight that has focused on people of Arab and South Asian background since Sept. 11 is changing the way race relations are discussed in America, expanding the dialogue well beyond the usual question of how blacks and whites deal with each other, members of those communities say.
Some of those changes come from outside — policy-makers and officials reaching out to include other groups, mentioning them in speeches, trying to learn more about them.
But others are internal. South Asian Americans and Arab Americans, many for the first time, are thinking of themselves and their communities in terms of racial identity and seeking a place in the racial dialogue.
“We have a new discussion. It’s not just black and white anymore; it’s black, white, brown, yellow, all the colors of the rainbow,” said Brandon Shamim of Los Angeles, who is of both Pakistani and Indian descent.
“The activists among us recognize this is an enormous opportunity to further the racial dialogue in a way that hasn’t happened since the beginning of the civil rights movement.”
According to a recent poll by The New York Times and CBS, a growing number of New Yorkers say that since the attacks, people are more tolerant of different ethnic and racial groups.
For the first time in 14 years, a majority of respondents of different races said racial relations were generally good in the city. Specifically, the poll found that 53 percent of blacks, 56 percent of Hispanics and 69 percent of whites believed that race relations are generally good.
Not everyone thinks the difference has been positive.
Ali Alarabi, the Palestinian-American president of the United Arab American League in Chicago, believes that Sept. 11 has indeed changed how America talks about race — but by uniting everyone against Arab Americans.
“After 9/11, all minorities were accepted into the American mainstream except Arab Americans,” he said. “They’ve all become part of the American fabric because they’re on the side of the victims.”
He added: “We’ve lost a lot of ground. This has set us back 100 years.”
Yemeni-Americans in Lackawanna, N.Y., were feeling some of that tension this week, after six men from the Yemeni community were arrested and accused of being part of an al-Qaida terrorist cell. Some in the community of about 1,000 said they have felt suspicion and hostility from some of their non-Yemeni neighbors since the arrests.
Before the attacks, many Americans from South Asian and the Middle East — being neither black nor white — did not see themselves as part of the race dialogue, and many were more concerned with assimilating.
But the backlash proved — painfully, in some cases, — that while they may not have seen themselves in racial terms, others did.
“It forced us to see how other people perceived us,” said Kapil Bawa, who is from India and is a professor of marketing at Baruch College in New York.
Some say that new sense of identity is helping to build bridges between communities.
“We actually understand what black people are talking about when they talk about profiling,” Shamim said. “Now we are able to understand and appreciate other minorities.”