The Backlash of 9/11
The events of September 11, 2001 left Americans shocked and
stunned. As we were reeling from the shock, some Americans also
experienced a backlash of discrimination and hate against
immigrants. This backlash shook the foundation of our individual
beliefs in the American Dream.
The National Asian Pacific American Legal Consortium reported that they
received reports of nearly 250 ethnically motivated incidents of
violence in the 3 months following September 11. As a South Asian
immigrant, I have been deeply disturbed by these hate crimes directed
at Americans who are members of my ethnic community, who are mistakenly
blamed for the horrible crimes in New York City, Washington and
Pennsylvania. Sadly the targeting of immigrants is nothing new.
The Italian Americans in the early 20th century, American Jews were
often stereotyped as Communists in the mid-20th century and the
Japanese Americans during World War II are some examples.
In this project, I initially decided to photograph people who were
indirect victims of violence since 9/11 and live in fear, in the new
reality after 9/11. In this new reality, some of us need to be
conscious of the way we look and how others perceive us and our names,
as these identifiers have taken on new and unintended meanings. As the
project evolved, many people that I spoke to from the South Asian
community said that they did not want their faces shown in connection
with their stories. To accommodate this fear, I decided to use an icon
that is unique to the individual yet unrecognizable to a viewer, the
fingerprint. The fingerprint can be used to identify a person and is an
important part of the identification process for immigrants, or for
criminals. It is a trace of a person and yet from it, the racial
identity of the individual is not recognizable. Interspersed with these
fingerprints are images of the eyes of some of the individuals whose
stories I am telling. The eye is also considered a “window into
the soul” but like a fingerprint, can also be used for identification
purposes through iris recognition technology. My final images are
created by scanning the images of eyes, fingerprints and text from
interviews onto the computer, using layering and collaging techniques
and manipulating them in PhotoShop and InDesign. The final prints are
presented against a background of photocopies of newspaper articles
relating to hate crimes and the SAALT (South Asian American Leaders of
Tomorrow) bias report in installations to reaffirm the statistical
basis for the paranoia that exists within the South Asian community.
The individual stories told in this portfolio range from a young boy
harassed in school because he has a name resembling a 9/11 hijacker, to
a mother who fears for the future of her bi-racial child.
The project gives insights into the lives of the innocent people who
have been targeted because they look different. Sharing the stories and
experiences of South Asians during this time will help Americans see
beyond their fears to increase their awareness of and compassion for
people who happen to look different, but are Americans themselves,
experiencing the same collective pain we all share in the wake of
September 11th.
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