Victories to savor for Sikhs & us all
On New Year’s Day, I will take my 2-year-old daughter to the mayoral inauguration in Hoboken, N.J. Why? I want her to celebrate Hoboken’s new leader, Ravi Singh Bhalla, who is one of the first turbaned Sikhs to be elected mayor in American history.
Bhalla was elected in November, just days after racist flyers were distributed around Hoboken that showed a photo of Bhalla with the message: “Don’t let TERRORISM take over our town.”
This was not the first time Bhalla was attacked for his unique appearance, and he was ready to respond with his values. As he wrote to his followers, “Of course this is troubling, but we won’t let hate win.”
Bhalla’s victory, along with three groundbreaking wins for Sikh American women on the West Coast, comes in a context of increasing xenophobia across the United States. But bigotry is not new to Sikh Americans.
Sikhs first came to the U.S. more than a century ago. Soon after their arrival, America witnessed its first anti-Sikh race riots, in 1907 in Bellingham, Wash. Back then, Americans knew so little about the Sikh religion that even reporters who covered the violence referred to the targets as “Hindus.”
More than 100 years later, little has changed for the Sikh community. Despite being the fifth-largest major world religion, Sikhism remains largely unknown in the American context. According to a 2013 study, 70% of Americans cannot identify a Sikh man in a picture as a Sikh.
That Americans are largely unaware of their Sikh neighbors has had disastrous consequences for the Sikh community. The first casualty of a post-9/11 hate crime was Balbir Singh Sodhi, a Sikh American in Mesa, Ariz. In 2012, a white supremacist entered a Sikh place of worship in Oak Creek, Wis., and opened fire on the congregation, murdering six. According to the Sikh Coalition, Sikh Americans continue to remain hundreds of times more likely to experience bias or backlash than other Americans, from racial profiling and workplace discrimination to school bullying and hate violence.
For decades now, Sikh Americans have felt overlooked and excluded from the American experience. But the election of Ravi Bhalla, Manka Dhingra, Preet Didbal and Sawinder Kaur represents a signal shift. Didbal, of Yuba City, Calif. became the first Sikh woman to serve as a mayor. Dhingra won her special election for a Washington state Senate seat, and Sawinder Kaur now serves on the Kent, Wash., City Council just six months after a Sikh was shot in her town and told to go back to his country.
These victories indicate that anyone can serve in public office no matter how they look or what they believe. More importantly, their democratic election sends the message that many of our fellow citizens are able to look beyond outward appearances and measure people on the content of their character. My parents immigrated to the United States in the 1970s. At the time, my father was the only turbaned Sikh in South Texas, and my brothers and I were the only kids with turbans in our schools. We grew up in a world with diverse heroes from various backgrounds — athletes, writers, actors, and civil rights champions — but none of them looked like us.
When my parents first moved here, they could not have imagined that one day a major city in New Jersey would elect a Sikh with a turban and beard. And knowing now that my daughter will grow up with civic heroes who share her background and look like her father gives me hope that she will view her Sikh identity as an asset rather than as a liability.
I know that we still have a long way to go before we reach true equity in this country, but, for now, I am going to take a moment to enjoy this milestone. It’s a victory for Bhalla, Dhingra, Kaur and Didbal and it’s a victory for the Sikh American community. But let’s remember that it’s also a major win for all of us who reject white supremacy and care deeply about the values of diversity, tolerance and inclusion. In that sense, it’s a victory for us all.