On National Tragedy And Personal Identity: Reflections On The Shootings In Wisconsin

by Guest Contributor Amit S. Bagga

As a preface, I encourage you to read this edited excerpt from Harsha Walia’s response to this incident langar, as well as the many in-home readings of the holy book, that both sides of my family, despite one being Hindu, decided to keep–but it wasn’t quite the same. At the end of the day, the Sikh-est thing about me was my middle name–and, well, the manifestation of that which pulses in all Sikh blood–the ability to two-step to a little bhangra.

As a small, effeminate, incredibly taunted child, I was perfectly happy with this arrangement. In public, I walked 10 steps ahead of my turbaned, bearded father, embarrassed by him and what he represented as the very quintessence of the “other.” I was not a part of what he represented, and I wasn’t going to allow him to represent me. In this pre-9/11 world, the rampant, ugly Islamaphobia of today’s America wasn’t nearly as discernible, and so it wasn’t being mistaken for Muslim (God forbid), that I was afraid of. It was that ever-hated “other”–the other that we’ve done such an exceptionally good job in our society of positing as the most destabilizing, feared, latently rapacious force around these here parts. And ironically enough, this “othering” has chipped away at what was once a big distance I felt the need to maintain from being Sikh.

It started, as altogether too many things have, after 9/11. The questions my dad got at the toll plaza on the Throgs Neck Bridge–the very same bridge he had been crossing twice a day, every day since the mid-1980s. The extra frisks at the airport; the stares in public; the silent, vapor of discomfort that seeps through space every time you walk into a restaurant or get out of your car at a gas station and too many white folks avert their eyes, anxiously convinced that they’re going be the next casualty of what was now known as “Islamic” terror.

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