by Lori Peek
neighborhood who was in front of us. He kept on telling all the
people in the checkpoint, “you have to search their stuff. They’re
probably carrying bombs.” He didn’t say anything directly to us, but
you knew he didn’t want us around.
This experience was so upsetting to laila because the man’s comments
essentially negated her and her family’s status as victims of the terrorist
attacks. They, too, had suffered losses and disruptions, but when they tried to
return home, they were regarded as nothing more than potential terrorists.
in some instances, the verbal threats that were directed against mus-
70 / Chapter 4
lims and their religious institutions were serious enough that they necessi-
tated police intervention. Two of the msA offices i visited in Colorado
summoned the campus police after they received several threatening
telephone messages. After a man called in a bomb threat to a suburban
Denver mosque, the local police recommended that the mosque shut down
its islamic school. Tamara, one of the teachers at the school, described what
happened:
i’m also a sunday school teacher. We had to close down the school
until late October [2001], because they knew that the Afghan com-
munity comes to the mosque. ninety-five percent of the students are
Afghan, Afghans on top of being muslim. All these combinations led
to the threats we received. We had a serious bomb scare. The next day
the police came. We didn’t stop Friday prayers, but the police recom-
mended we close down the school until things settled down.
The initial and most severe wave of backlash violence that followed the
terrorist attacks seriously affected Tamara and other muslims. Then, in early
October 2001, the U.s.-led invasion of Afghanistan began. This military strike
resulted in another round of attacks against muslims and led to increased
scrutiny on the grounds of faith and ethnic origin.
several interviewees reported that they had non-muslim and non-Arab
friends and acquaintances who were also verbally harassed or threatened
after 9/11. rashida noted that her roommate, who was biracial, was
approached by an enraged man who screamed profanities at her: “There’s so
much ignorance. nobody really knows the difference between how an Arab
looks, how a pakistani looks. One of my roommates is mixed race, half black
and half white. some guy comes running up to her and screaming, ‘look at
what your f—ing people did to our country.’”
Another woman, nadira, described what happened to her former
brother-in-law a week after 9/11:
my sister’s ex-husband, he’s paralyzed from the waist down, but he
drives. He looks Arab; he just does, but he’s not. He was in the gas sta-
tion getting gas. This older, white man started screaming at him and
cursing at him and saying, “i’m going to kill you. i’m going to beat
you up.” He said, “But i’m paralyzed, what are you doing?” He’s like,
“i don’t care.” The police had to come for this man to leave.
The man whose life was threatened was not Arab or muslim. He was
latino and Catholic, and thus nadira was certain that his dark complexion
was the “trigger” that resulted in the confrontation outside the gas station.
Backlash / 71
This incident was particularly alarming to nadira, as it seemed to prove that
anyone who could possibly be categorized as Arab or muslim—even a man
with a serious physical disability—was vulnerable to attack.
Nonverbal Hostility
in addition to verbal harassment and threats of violence, muslim Americans
were subjected to hostile looks as they moved through public places. As one
respondent remarked, “in one way or another, we all at the very least had to
deal with the looks. We all get the looks.” Discourteous stares may seem like a
minor issue, especially when compared to the other life-threatening incidents
that numerous muslims and Arabs faced after 9/11. However, the glares and
the insinuation of guilt associated with these looks made the participants
feel afraid and excluded. in some cases, the stares were so menacing that the
participants avoided public settings altogether. One young woman stayed
home for five days because of the looks she received in the aftermath of the
terrorist attacks: “immediately when it happened, me and my dad were in
the car. i had my cell phone. A white lady stopped in the middle of the street
and looked at us really hard in the car. even when i was walking around my
neighborhood, i felt very terrified, because people were staring at me like i did
something wrong. i didn’t come out of my house for five days.”
muslim women who wear the hijab are the most recognizable rep-
resentatives of their faith. in the United states, where muslim women who
cover make up only a tiny percentage of the larger population, they are
especially visible. not surprisingly, muslim American women who wear
the headscarf are used to being stared at and asked questions about their
dress and islamic faith. After 9/11, however, the looks changed from curious
or confused glances to overtly hostile stares. rajah emphasized this shift
and noted that the stares also made her want to avoid venturing outside:
“We’re used to being stared at. But this, this was a different kind of stare, a
lot of glares, suspicious looks. The first day it didn’t really hit me, just the
magnitude of it all. Then, all this started, and i started not wanting to go
outside.”
sara, who like rajah wore the headscarf, described a humiliating incident
where she was “stared down” by a police officer just days after 9/11:
This is a time when the patience of muslims is being tested. We’re
not supposed to react how we want to. i got stared down by a cop.
i’ve never been stared down. i don’t mean to say racism or anything,
maybe he’s from a place where he didn’t grow up with any minority
people or with an ethnic background. i took that into account. He
looked at me a couple of times. people had to look back to see who
72 / Chapter 4
he’s looking at. i was very scared, embarrassed, ashamed. i thought,
“Why are these people looking at me?” i looked at him and said, “Hi,
everything’s okay?” He got caught by the moment that i asked him;
he thought i wouldn’t ask him. He said, “Hi, how are you doing?” i
said, “Fine.” if i would have had time, i would have shown him my
iD and said, “please don’t look at us like this. i don’t want to be in
a situation where i’m going to be stared down and an entire block is
looking at me. look at my iD. i’m an American, just like you.”
some of the men, especially those with darker skin who “looked
muslim,” also reported a dramatic change in the ways they were stared at
after 9/11: “you’ve been living here all your life, and all of a sudden there’s
all this hatred. something went wrong. Why is this person staring at me?
i’ve stood on this corner in just the same way a billion times before, and no
one ever said anything to me before or looked at me this way. We know that
something has changed.”
The different types of hostile looks that the men and women received
represented the most consistent and unmistakable reminders that something
had indeed changed for muslims in the aftermath of the terrorist strikes
on new york and Washington, D.C. Although the participants could not
always know with certainty the intent of the person who was staring at them,
muslims shared a general sense that the looks were meant to intimidate and
to convey hate, suspicion, and fear. i discuss these various forms of nonverbal
hostility in turn below.
Hate Stares
First, there were the stares that made muslims feel hated. These looks were
penetrating and vicious, communicating anger, disgust, even loathing. The
muslims who were subjected to hate stares felt as if they were being personally
blamed for destroying the Twin Towers and ending the lives of thousands of
people on 9/11. These stares were so discomforting that one of the women
described them as “just unbearable.” Another woman experienced such a
hostile look that she was brought to tears: “i remember i got on the train one
time and sat next to some guy. He gave me this really, really mean look. you
could just tell he was trying to . . . i started to write in my journal, because
that’s how i get my emotions out. i was crying when i was writing about this
guy staring at me like this.”
As scholars have pointed out, the hate stare is a very old racist device used
against African Americans that dates back to at least the eighteenth century
and still continues today.14 John Howard Griffin, the white journalist who
darkened his skin and traveled through the southern United states as a black
Backlash / 73
man in the late 1950s, vividly describes this phenomenon in Black Like Me.
Griffin’s first experience with a hate stare came from a white woman selling
bus tickets in new Orleans. Here he explains what the hate stare looks like:
“Taking care to pitch my voice to politeness, i asked about the next bus to
Hattiesburg. she answered rudely and glared at me with such loathing i knew
i was receiving what negroes call ‘the hate stare.’ it was my first experience
with it. it is far more than the look of disapproval one occasionally gets. This
was so exaggeratedly hateful i would have been amused if i had not been so
surprised.”
Griffin’s next encounter with a hate stare came moments later, as he
crossed the path of a white man sitting in the “Whites Only” section of the
bus station lobby. Here he speaks of what the hate stare felt like:
Once again a “hate stare” drew my attention like a magnet. it came
from a middle-aged, heavyset, well-dressed white man. He sat a few
yards away, fixing his eyes on me. nothing can describe the wither-
ing horror of this. you feel lost, sick at heart before such unmasked
hatred, not so much because it threatens you as because it shows
humans in such an inhuman light. you see a kind of insanity, some-
thing so obscene the very obscenity of it (rather than its threat) ter-
rifies you.15
As Griffin notes, African Americans were so accustomed to being abused
with this type of hostile look that they had given it a name: the hate stare.
muslim Americans, on the other hand, do not have the same sort of lengthy
history of collective suffering as do African Americans. As a consequence,
muslims in the United states have yet to develop a shared vocabulary
to characterize this form of aggression. The men and women whom i
interviewed used such words as “horrible,” “mean,” “bad,” “nasty,” “evil eye,”
and “hateful” to try to capture the essence of the looks.
i’m just standing outside my apartment, and this couple comes out of
the building. i’ve seen them before, but this time, they just gave me
this look. i felt butterflies go in my stomach. you feel awkward, out
of place. Why are they giving me this horrible look?
immediately after 9/11, it was hard. When walking around on the
streets, it made me nervous, because people would give me the bad
stares.
One of my friends that wears the hijab, she went to Ground Zero
and was helping. she was giving stuff to drink to the rescuers. she
74 / Chapter 4
described how awful it was down there. she was literally going home
covered in blood and mud from that place, only to receive the hate-
ful looks from people in the train. she’s down there volunteering her
time and energy. she’s not asking for recognition, but at least she
should not be given these looks.
Intimidation Stares
second, after 9/11, the participants were targeted much more often with
stares and other nonverbal actions that they perceived as meant to intimidate
and to frighten them. These forms of nonverbal hostility made the muslim
men and women feel especially vulnerable to physical attack as they navigated
their neighborhoods and city streets. Jinan received looks from men in a car
who repeatedly drove by her for no other apparent reason than to scare her.
These actions were so menacing that she considered removing her headscarf
so that she would be less identifiable as a muslim:
even my neighbors, it’s not the kind of neighborhood that a muslim
could feel comfortable in to begin with. it’s predominantly white,
Judeo-Christian. so these people have attitudes. i remember people
staring at me. There were these guys who kept driving past me and
giving me these looks, just for no reason, just to freak me out when
i was walking in town. so i was even scared to go out of my house. i
was thinking about taking off my scarf.
Suspicious Stares
Third, the interviewees noted a sudden rise in suspicious looks, double takes,
and watchful stares after 9/11. Because their religion was linked to the most
destructive terrorist attacks in the nation’s history, the interviewees understood
why those around them were monitoring their words and actions so carefully.
The participants still found the prying stares bothersome, especially because
they assumed that people were observing their appearance and actions because
they could now see muslims only through a lens associated with terrorism.
During a focus group interview, two women described their frustration with
the stares directed at them as they commuted to and from school:
right after 9/11, i was scared of looking into people’s eyes in the sub-
way. That’s why i was always looking down. i didn’t want to see that
they were staring at me. now i’ll look around a little more. When i’m
studying for class, i can see they try to see what i’m studying. They’ll
look at my books.
Backlash / 75
i hate that, especially when i’m trying to study chemical engineering.
They’re probably thinking, “That’s her bomb manual.” They literally
look and try to read. i look at their faces, and they don’t feel ashamed.
They just keep looking at what i’m studying.
The first speaker, selma, responded to this form of nonverbal hostility
through avoiding people’s g
azes. she realized that by looking down, she was
feeding into the stereotype of the passive, submissive muslim woman. she
also knew that by averting her eyes, she would possibly make people more
suspicious of her actions. regardless, selma found it too painful and too
emotionally exhausting to confront the numerous people who stared at her
every day.
media and political rhetoric against islam intensified following 9/11,
which undoubtedly contributed to the cloud of suspicion hanging over
the muslim American community. in a radio appearance promoting his
new novel, new york republican Congressional representative peter King
claimed that the vast majority of American muslim community leaders
are “an enemy living amongst us” and that “no American muslims” have
cooperated in the War on Terror. He added that “about eighty to eighty-
five percent of the mosques in this country are controlled by islamic
fundamentalists.”16
moreover, several of the Bush administration’s antiterrorism activities
fueled feelings of mistrust among the general populace. One of the most
notorious proposals was for the creation of the Total information Awareness
(TiA) system. The original logo for the TiA was a glowing, all-seeing eye.
This image captured the intent of the program, which was to create an “ultra-
large, all-source information repository” meant to track citizens’ every move,
from Web surfing to doctor visits, travel plans to university grades, passport
applications to bank withdrawals.17 The extensive data-mining project
granted traditional law enforcement agencies as well as the Federal Bureau of
investigation (FBi) and the Central intelligence Agency (CiA) the authority
to conduct “suspicionless surveillance” of American citizens without any
judicial oversight.18
in 2002, Attorney General John Ashcroft and the Justice Department
proposed an initiative by the name of Operation Tips (Terrorism information
and prevention system). Under Ashcroft’s plan, one million American
citizens—mail carriers, meter readers, cable technicians, utility employees,
and other workers with access to private homes—would be recruited as
informants to report any “suspicious activities” or “unusual behaviors” to the
Justice Department. Operation Tips was not without its critics. lee Tien, a