Refusing to Hate

By Silja J.A. Talvi, ColorLines. Posted December 27, 2002.

Asha Mohammad, a 36-year-old mother of three, has lived in West Seattle for a decade. It was here, after all, that Mohammad and her family had found a community of their own, living amongst other Somali Muslim immigrants who relied on each other for support, news and updates from Somalia, and help in adjusting to their newly adopted country. America had promised freedom of religion and freedom of speech--and an opportunity to start again, to heal from still-vivid memories of war and repression.

Things had never been easy. Like so many immigrant communities, the Somali community in Seattle struggled to make ends meet, to try to fit in, to learn the language, and to navigate the bureaucracies of government agencies. But no amount of acculturation could have prepared Mohammad and her family--or the extended Somali community--for the aftermath of September 11th, 2001.

A few days after the violent terrorist attacks on U.S soil, a 16-year-old Somali girl was attacked and stabbed at a gas station in West Seattle. Four days later, six Somali women were fired from their jobs for wearing the hijab. And then, came the raids. INS raids, FBI raids, U.S. Treasury raids, USDA raids. In Seattle, Somali men were dragged into detention, where many still sit and wonder if they'll ever be reunited with their families. Small Somali grocery stores were ransacked, emptied, and shut down on suspicion of money laundering and food stamp mis-handling, only to be reopened months later after successful legal challenges.

The community didn't know what had hit them, or why the attention seemed to have been turned on them. Feeling estranged and frightened from the community around them, Somalis huddled together to try to understand what was happening, feeling more isolated with each passing day.

Unbeknownst to them, their experience was mirrored in immigrant communities across the Puget Sound--and across the nation. Sikhs were assaulted and terrorized. Recent Middle Eastern immigrants had their houses searched in the middle of the night and their family members interrogated and secretly detained.

But for her part, Mohammad got used to being stared at and called names when she walked down the street wearing her traditional hijab. Her attempt to give blood after September 11th was denied after the volunteer looked at her last name. She was sent home feeling waves of shame and confusion. But even this, she thought, she could handle. And then her eight-year-old daughter, riding her bike in West Seattle, was accosted by a 19-year-old man.

"Go back to where you came from," the man yelled at her daughter, after pushing her off her bike.

"Why do you want me to go back to California?," her U.S.-born daughter said in response.

The cruelty of the incident, which left her daughter with a large scar on her face, was almost too much for Mohammad to bear: "My heart just sank," she explains.

Testifying before a commission of elected officials, FBI and INS representatives, and over a thousand attendees at a groundbreaking forum in Seattle this fall, "Justice for All: The Aftermath of September 11th," Mohammad braved her trepidations to explain why she, her family, and all immigrant residents, deserved better.

"We are here in America, our new home," testified Mohammad in front of more than 1,200 attendees. "[S]peeches from a lot of leaders [say] that America is for everybody, that America is for all. But, this is now what we feel. We feel rejected, we experience hatred and violence. [Our] community is desperately seeking peace and safety ... Today, we are here to say, as a community, enough is enough."

From Hate to Hope

The Hate Free Zone (HFZ) Campaign of Washington, brainchild of longtime activist and author Pramila Jayapal, came into being out of the crisis that Seattle's immigrants and refugees found themselves in after 9/11.

As hate crimes and incidents of overt discrimination began to pile up all around the Pacific Northwest, Jayapal turned to other activist, civil liberties, and civil rights organizations to win support for a draft statement that would declare Seattle a "hate-free zone." City council members responded affirmatively, and quickly signed a proclamation condemning racial or religious harassment.

But proclamations, as Jayapal knew, wouldn't be enough to stem the tide of hate crimes and the impact of federal edicts geared toward the new "aliens" in our midst. In quick succession, the Department of Justice (DOJ) and Congress passed laws and regulations ostensibly designed to reign in terrorism. The net effect of all the legislation and assorted DOJ edicts--ranging from the USA Patriot Act and the airport-focused "Operation Tarmac" to the INS/DOJ "Alien Absconder Apprehension Initiative"--was the interrogation, secret detention, or deportation of thousands of people, mostly Arab American or Muslim men.

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