What Sikhs’ awareness campaign doesn’t say

You see them on television ads talking about their values and pursuits that are very American — family, education, religious freedom, gender equality. The ads, along with a social media splash, coincided with annual rallies and festivities to demonstrate their cultural identity. At the march in Times Square, volunteers fashioned turbans for tourists and the curious against a festive backdrop.

The awareness push is about Sikhs, their place in America and the retaliation against them often only because of their physical appearances.

The “We are Sikhs” campaign has an affirmative, upbeat tone.

And it would be even more celebratory if not for the intolerance and violence that made it necessary in the first place.

What goes largely unsaid in the campaign is we’re not Muslim.

Which is not irrelevant or insignificant, given that in an untold number of the hundreds of cases of intimidation, harassment and assaults of Sikhs, the perpetrators mistook them for Arabs or Muslims.

As in the first documented case of retaliation following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, in which Balbir Singh Sodhi was slain outside his Mesa gas station by a gunman out to “kill a Muslim.”

As in the 2013 mob attack near Central Park of Prabhjot Singh, a physician and professor of medicine in New York, whose attackers shouted “Osama” and “terrorist.”

And the 2015 shooting of store clerk Gurleen Kaur in Grand Rapids, Mich., at the hands of a robber who called him a “terrorist.” It is an unenviable position for Sikhs. The community, which originally hailed from the Punjab state of India, has been established in the United States for more than 100 years. Their faith places high value on social justice and religious tolerance.

But their attire and physical appearances – the devout keep their beards and hair uncut – perpetuate the idea of them as outsiders. Their turbans, worn to reflect devotion to God and being trusted to the community, get misinterpreted as Muslim garb.

Unenviable for Sikhs because the people they’re mistaken for face similar discrimination and an even demanding set of expectations. Muslims in America are distrusted at even a higher rate than Sikhs and are pressed, almost hectored, into condemning actions taken by those who have hijacked the faith.

How do you distance yourself from one who also gets maliciously stereotyped and targeted?

The “We are Sikh” campaign adroitly avoids the issue. Rightly too.

Sikhs and Sikhism were prone for misunderstanding and mistrust, the community struck by intolerance and discrimination, long before the Sept. 11 attacks.

That Sikhs are attacked because they’re mistaken for Muslims may be important for institutions that prosecute and track crimes, and for the media to note in their reporting for context.

(And even context has the potential to distort — is the crime more reprehensible, or poignant, because the assailant targeted the wrong person; is the victim more sympathetic because of it?)

But pull back from the particular incidents and one gets the more important universal point: That hate is the root cause. Ignorance merely abetted the act.

The “We are Sikh” campaign knows that, too.