Like many commentators, I have struggled to fashion a coherent narrative to the tenth anniversary of 9/11.  A few reflections.

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My parents migrated to the United States from India in the 1970s.  Four decades ago, Indian professionals obtained American visas by settling in rural areas.  The relationship appeared mutually beneficial: American citizenship in exchange for providing services such as health care to a needy population.  We entered the Indian diasporic community of Weirton, WV – Steubenville and East Liverpool, OH – and Pittsburgh, PA.

As with many second generationers, I grew up “American” on weekdays and “Indian” on weekends.  On weekends, my family would join other Indian émigrés for social, religious, and community events.  Usually, people hosted small gatherings at home, though “small” routinely included upwards of 100 guests.  The conversation typically revolved around exorbitant healthcare costs, aggressive investment strategies, relative (de-)merits of the hostess’ culinary abilities, and latest trends in Bollywood, music, and fashion.  This template continued unperturbed until 9/11, whether I went to Indian parties in our community, New York, New Jersey, Chicago, or Los Angeles.  An informal survey of friends confirms similar patterns nationwide.

After 9/11, conversations changed abruptly.  Physicians lamented the 15-20% decreases in revenue as patients stopped coming and physicians stopped referring to them.  Men shaved beards to avoid resemblance to the Taliban.  Women described threats as they walked with their heads covered.  Hindus and Sikhs insisted that they were not Muslims, Muslims insisted that they were not terrorists, and we all strove to manifest patriotism: American flags outside homes and bumper stickers of support for the NYPD and NYFD on cars.

This growing community consciousness coincided with an increased awareness of difference.  We could all list the innumerable types of discrimination perpetrated by Caucasians, but racism by Blacks?  The victims of America’s Original Sin of Slavery?  This heralded a troubling new phenomenon.  While turbaned Sikhs suffered visibly, a number of us also faced abuse.  “Go back to Afghanistan/Pakistan/Iraq/[insert Asian country]!” we’d hear.

How do we go back?  This is the only home we know.

Other humiliations:

(1) Foreignness became a proxy to discredit President Obama.  Hillary Clinton added fuel to the fire by emphasizing his Muslim middle name.  Donald Trump questioned Obama’s birthplace despite ample evidence to the contrary.  President Obama has responded by shunning overt support from Muslims.

(2) The Transportation Security Administration imposed draconian security regulations.  Must we really live the lie that security checks on Brown men are “random”?  South Asian and Middle Eastern men – whether native or foreign born – are perceived to be different and experience routine suspicion with little ability to protest.

(3) Hispanics became the target of xenophobia.  The Pew Hispanic Center noted: “The annual inflow of unauthorized immigrants to the United States was nearly two-thirds smaller in the March 2007 to March 2009 period than it had been from March 2000 to March 2005… This sharp decline has contributed to an overall reduction of 8% in the number of unauthorized immigrants currently living in the U.S.-to 11.1 million in March 2009 from a peak of 12 million in March 2007, according to the estimates. The decrease represents the first significant reversal in the growth of this population over the past two decades” (http://pewhispanic.org/reports/report.php?ReportID=126).  This news released before Arizona passed the toughest state bill on illegal immigration in 2010, with up to 20 other state legislators praising the bill or pledging to follow suit in 2011 (http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/68505).

How to make sense of this all?  I can only surmise that there has been a seismic shift in the tectonics of social difference in the United States – race has given way to migration as a legitimate excuse for exclusionary citizenship.

In an insightful essay called “Democracy De-realized,” Homi Bhabha suggests that lessons of equality and justice are best learned from those marginalized and disenfranchised within sovereign states that claim to promote liberal ideals of democracy.  To de-realize democracy is to “de-familiarize” it, to “recognize not its failure but its frailty, its fraying edges or limits that impose their will of inclusion and exclusion on those who are considered – on the grounds of their race, culture, gender or class – unworthy of the democratic process” (http://dio.sagepub.com/content/50/1/27.full.pdf+html).

Immigrants have come to embody that class of people now worthy of exclusion.  How else do we grasp the backlash against Brown immigrants, against Hispanics de jure and Asians de facto?  How else do we rationalize the American government’s invocation of the War on Terror to perpetrate abuses at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib even as it chides other nations for human rights abuses?  America’s collective unconscious cannot confront the anxiety of recognizing the central conflict: We are a nation of immigrants, but 9/11 would not have happened had we let the right immigrants in.  Determining exactly who are the right [re: safe, conformable, non-threatening] immigrants has led to wire taps, curbs on speech, and other infringements on civil liberties – in short, the defraying of the democratic process.

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I don’t claim this to be the sole truth of 9/11.  On the contrary, I would dispute that any single monolithic Truth could emerge.  Rather, these reflections are experiential truths.  The generalizability of these truths may be in doubt, but not their existence or the discomfort they generate.

Much as I cannot find a way to neatly draw conclusions from 9/11, I cannot neatly conclude this essay.  So I end here.