Nadine Naber,
"'Look, Mohammed the Terrorist Is Coming!' Cultural Racism, Nation-Based Racism, and the Intersectionality of Oppressions after 9/11"
(page 2 of 6)
Historical Context
On a global scale, the repeated framing of the aftermath of September
11 as an endless, fluid war has facilitated the Bush administration's
conflation of diverse individuals, movements, and historical contexts
such as bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, any and all forms of Palestinian
resistance to Israeli occupation, Hizballah, Hamas, and al-Qaeda under
the rubric "Islamic fundamentalists/Muslim terrorists." It has also
justified war on Afghanistan and Iraq, support for Israeli occupation,
Israel's war on Lebanon, and the transfer to the Philippines of U.S.
troops who have enacted human rights violations against local people
under the guise of "saving innocent people from terrorism." Within the
geographic borders of the United States, the "war on terror" took on
local form in the expansion of anti-immigrant discourses and practices
beyond the axes of "illegal criminal" to "evil terrorist enemy within."
On April 6, 2002, former attorney general John Ashcroft succinctly
captured the federal government's framing of the aftermath of September
11 as a war against terrorists who are everywhere and anywhere with the
following statement: "In this new war our enemy's platoons infiltrate
our borders, quietly blending in with visiting tourists, students and
workers. They move unnoticed through our cities, neighborhoods and
public spaces.... Their tactics rely on evading recognition at the border
and escaping detection within the United States."[7]
September 11-related immigration policies have targeted immigrants
who fit amorphous characterizations of a "terrorist profile" through FBI
investigations and spying, INS police raids, detentions, deportations,
and interrogations of community organizations and activists. The INS
targeted non-citizens from Muslim-majority countries as well as some
individuals from Muslim-majority countries who were naturalized. These
tactics were part of the federal government's implementation of a "wide
range of domestic, legislative, administrative, and judicial measures in
the name of national security and the war on terrorism"[8].
The "war on terror" also justified an intensification of anti-immigrant policies
that affected a range of immigrant communities, particularly those
historically racialized as nonwhite. For example, in the months
following September 11, in San Francisco, the INS passed as local police
in an effort to uphold Ashcroft's message that undocumented immigrants
are the enemy, and members of local law enforcement are part of the
solution. Reflecting on this period, Rosa Hernandez, a Latina community
activist, reported in an interview that, "The INS was engaging in random
raids at supermarkets, bus stops, and among unlicensed flower vendors."
In February 2002, the federal government officially took over airport
security. In the San Francisco Bay Area, this meant marking Filipino/a
airport screeners as scapegoats in the attacks and laying them off en
masse. Improving security meant replacing non-citizen workers with
citizens who tended to be retired white military and police who received
better pay, more benefits, and more respect. Several scholars and
activists have added that the "war on terror" has legitimized an
intensification of police brutality within working-class communities of
color, exposed low-income students of color to unprecedented levels of
military recruitment, and forced massive budget cuts that have
disproportionately diminished social services and funding for schools in
low-income communities of color.
Among Arab diasporas in the San Francisco Bay Area, September
11-related hate crimes and other forms of harassment in the public
sphere disproportionately targeted persons who displayed what dominant
government and corporate media discourses often represented as emblems
of a constructed "Arab/Middle Eastern/Muslim" identity, including
particular kinds of names, appearances, or nations of origin that
signified an association with the enemy of the nation. Such identity
markers hailed multiple subject positions into the "war on terror"
through hate crimes and various forms of violence, harassment, and
intimidation in the public sphere—at school, on the bus, at work, at
home, and on the streets.
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