“Look, Mohammed the Terrorist Is Coming!”
Cultural Racism, Nation-Based Racism, and the Intersectionality of Oppressions after 9/11

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.”¹

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”². 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.

1. Ashcroft, John. 6 June 2002. Attorney General Prepared Remarks on the National Security Entry-Exit System. Washington, D.C. (February 8, 2007). [↩]
2. Cainkar, Louise. 2003. “The Impact of the September 11 Attacks and their Aftermath on Arab and Muslim Communities in the United States.” GSC Quarterly 13 (Summer/Fall): 1. [↩]