On the eve of the fourth anniversary of 9/11, a young Indian-American scholar decided to travel across the US.
Her mission: to examine how the lives of religious and ethnic minorities in the US -- who faced hate crimes following the World Trade Center terrorist attacks -- have changed since that day.
Valarie Kaur is spearheading a research project titled Discrimination and National Security Initiative, an official affiliate of the Pluralism Project at Harvard University, Massachusetts, USA, a preeminent research centre on the state of religious communities in the United States.
Four years later she is retracing her steps and interviewing the same individuals she met in 2001, including the family of Balbir Singh Sodhi, the Sikh gas station owner from Mesa, Arizona who was murdered on September 15, 2001 in one of the first incidents of racial backlash after the fall of the Twin Towers.
"The human consequences of a backlash are not reduced to statistics or numbers, but are still real and should be presented to the general public and policymakers for their consideration," says Dawinder 'Dave' Sidhu, a civil rights attorney with the federal government and co-founder and co-director of the DNSI project along with Kaur.
"These human consequences of a backlash include a Sikh boy deciding to cut his hair in the hope that he will be more accepted by his peers, a Muslim couple avoiding air travel, or even families moving back to their countries of origin," explains Sidhu.
Kaur told rediff India Abroad, "Many Americans know that hate crimes took place after 9/11, but we as a nation have yet to understand the far-reaching impact of such violence or how it continues to divide us. DNSI's database and reports will work to aid scholars, practi ...