by Lori Peek
82 / Chapter 4
it only stopped because i said something. Had i not, i think it would have
continued.”
Those who were employed in the service sector had to contend with
a sharp post-9/11 rise in discrimination from co-workers and customers.
nationally, gas stations, convenience stores, and ethnic restaurants—
workplaces where working-class south Asian and middle eastern Americans
are concentrated—were especially hard hit in this regard.24 Taxi drivers in
new york City, 85 percent of whom are estimated to be muslim, suffered a
severe drop in income, increased financial worries, and more hostility from
passengers after 9/11.25 One interviewee highlighted this problem: “i know a
lot of taxi drivers. They’re afraid of the windows getting bashed; they have
no customers. They’re from the middle east, or they’re indian or pakistani.”
Another man who worked as a taxi driver in new york said:
ninety percent of the people who get in the cab, they just ignore
you, or they’re curious about where you’re from, why you have the
muslim name. But then there’s that 10 percent who you can just feel
them tense up. you can sense that they don’t like you, and they are
angry about your religion, about where you come from. Those are the
people i’m scared of. you just can’t know what’s going to happen to
you, whether those angry ones are going to get violent on you.
One interviewee noted that the anti-muslim backlash from passengers
resulted in layoffs at the car company where his uncle was employed: “my
uncle works in a car company. The people are calling in and saying, ‘Don’t
send a muslim driver.’ As a consequence, the company says, ‘We don’t need
muslim drivers.’”
A young woman who worked with her immigrant parents at a motel
stopped wearing the headscarf after 9/11. she explained that her family was
fearful of how customers would react upon seeing a covered muslim woman
at the front counter: “i have been helping out my parents in running a motel
business. my parents didn’t want me to wear the headscarf, because they
believe that when dealing with customers, you never know what type of
people you will meet.”
Following 9/11, participants were more hesitant to ask their employers for
accommodations to fulfill their islamic religious obligations. For example,
practicing muslims sometimes must request a private space to pray, extended
lunch periods on Fridays to attend Friday prayers, time off for islamic
holidays, and modifications to wardrobe requirements to wear islamic attire
at work. even though they have a legal right to make such requests, the
men and women were fearful that they might be “looked down upon” or
even fired if they asked for any type of “special treatment” on the job. Ali,
Backlash / 83
who began student teaching in the fall of 2003, had a particularly difficult
encounter with the principal at his new high school:
in the situation i’m in, i have a more flexible schedule where i can
sneak in the time during prep hours or during lunch hours to get my
prayers done. On a daily basis, that’s what i need to do to fulfill my
need to pray. so on a daily basis, it’s not a problem. The only concern
would be the Friday prayers. That takes more than five minutes. it
takes at least an hour. Depending on the location, if you have to travel
there [to the mosque], it might take more. in the school where i work
now, this was something i had to bring up early on. The principal had
to make a schedule for me, so he deserves to know this. Before school
started, before we were even in the classroom, i told my principal that
i have a religious need to be fulfilled, that every Friday i have to go to
the mosque. it takes an hour at most from here. He responded very
unprofessionally, sucked in his breath, moaned, rolled his eyes, and
said, “Oh, God,” as if it was trouble for him. i knew that he was not
professional about this.
After Ali described this encounter, i asked him how he responded. He
replied:
i contacted different people and heard different things. some people
said, “schools don’t have a requirement to fulfill your needs.” Others
said, “They have an obligation to help you practice your faith or at
least make an accommodation for it.” The librarian, he spoke up
for me. i didn’t know who he was. He came up to me and asked me
how i was doing. i told him about the situation, and he spoke to the
principal. He spoke up to accommodate my need. later the principal
said, “From now on you just leave at noon. We’ll give you five periods
of classes Friday morning and then you’re gone for the day.” i said,
“Okay, great.” i was really happy to have that happen.
Ali realized that had it not been for the intervention of the librarian, who
was a highly respected senior staff member at the school, he may not have
been granted this accommodation. And, in the worst-case scenario, he was
fearful that he might have lost his teaching position altogether.
Housing Discrimination
muslims also experienced discrimination in the housing sector as a conse-
quence of the post-9/11 backlash. Among the persons whom i interviewed,
84 / Chapter 4
non–U.s. citizens were the most likely to report being turned away or bla-
tantly mistreated as they attempted to navigate the housing market. Khalid, a
graduate student from Turkey who had moved to new york City just prior to
9/11, was unable to secure an apartment for several weeks after the disaster.
He was forced to sleep in the library at his university (which fortunately was
open twenty-four hours a day) and to shower at an on-campus gym. Although
Khalid initially blamed his problem on the general lack of affordable housing
in the city, he later revealed that several of the people he had contacted in
his attempt to find an apartment had hung up on him when they heard his
islamic name and heavy Turkish accent. Khalid described one renter who was
especially confrontational: “He said, ‘What nation are you from?’ i said, ‘i am
from Turkey. i am a graduate student at Columbia.’ Then he said to me, ‘Oh,
are you working on terrorism at Columbia?’ i asked his name. He told me,
‘Why are you asking my name? Are you going to blow me up?’ Then he starts
shouting at me.”
Khalid eventually found an apartment and was able to stop sleeping in
the campus library. He completed his master’s degree in the spring of 2003,
and soon after his graduation he returned to Turkey. We spoke just before he
left the United states, and he remarked:
Before i came to the United states, i was always thinking to stay here
and continue my life here, because when i moved here, i saw that you
can easily live your life however you like. But after 9/11, i thought to
myself that i shouldn’t stay here, i should go back to my country. i
really lost my motivation, and it has become very hard for me to con-
tinue here. Being a muslim or being a foreigner in the United states
is not easy.
; Khalid’s identity as a muslim and a foreigner left him doubly vulnerable to
discrimination following 9/11.
Those muslims who were born and raised in the United states also
experienced housing discrimination. However, the security and cultural
familiarity that comes with citizenship meant that they were more likely
to fight back against biased renters. An apartment manager in Brooklyn
mistreated Hassan, a native of new Jersey. As he explained how he responded
to the discrimination, he contrasted the reactions of native-born muslim
Americans with recently arrived muslim immigrants:
i’m beginning to realize through talking to people that there are two
different types of reactions. There are reactions of the people who
were born here, and who are American, like myself, who have been
in the country and know how the system works, know a lot about
Backlash / 85
it. And then there’s the reaction of the people who are not from the
country, the international students and the foreign workers, who are
here on a temporary basis or just new to the country and who really
are more fearful about what’s going on in general. i feel like the people
that are born and raised here, especially because of the language, they
know how to get by; they won’t really stand out as much as somebody
with an accent who looks different or doesn’t know how to act, hasn’t
melted into the melting pot that much. my reaction, when someone
harassed me as i called about the apartment [in Brooklyn] was like
this. First, because of my name, they know i am probably muslim.
so, when they started to get an attitude, i was able to respond and
say, “listen, what you said, you’re discriminating against me. i could
report you.” But people from other countries, the non–U.s. citizens,
they may not be as familiar with such things.
Hassan identified a number of resources that muslim citizens were able
to draw upon as they navigated a hostile post-9/11 environment. native-born
muslims not only know the language and customs of the United states; they
also “know how the system works.” To Hassan, this meant confronting the
apartment owner and advising him that he would report the discriminatory
behavior to the local housing authority. Hassan understood that the housing
discrimination that he experienced violated his civil rights and that channels
were available for him to report the incident.
Government appeals for citizen vigilance in the aftermath of 9/11 may
have provoked, at least in part, the hostile treatment that Khalid, Hassan,
and other muslims encountered as they searched for housing. specifically,
following the terror attacks, the FBi issued an advisory warning that
terrorists might have rented apartment units with the intent of blowing up
buildings from the inside. The FBi subsequently called on property owners,
public housing officials, and landlords to be on the lookout for potential
terrorists attempting to rent apartments.26
some of the women in this study, all of whom lived in apartment
complexes in new york City, were asked by their landlords to stop wearing
their headscarves. The landlords made this request on the grounds that
the muslim women’s visibility was making other tenants uncomfortable or
suspicious. Kaori, an international student from Japan who converted to
islam, had multiple run-ins with her landlords, a married couple who lived
in the same building, following 9/11:
my landlords, they were really nice people before [9/11], but these
days they are kind of mean to me and tell me to take the hijab off.
They’re very discriminatory people. Whenever they see me, they just
86 / Chapter 4
beg me, “please take it off. Because i don’t want any muslim woman
living in my apartments.” it hurts me, but they are my landlords, and
they are saying these things. After 9/11, they didn’t like me, and they
became very mean. i’m just telling them very patiently that i can’t
take it off. This is my religion.
Kaori ended up staying in her apartment, even though she was very uncom-
fortable. Finally, months after 9/11, her landlords stopped harassing her and
making comments about her headscarf. Kaori never reported the landlords
for their actions.
Discrimination in Education
College campuses are often depicted as liberal bastions where tolerance and
respect for diversity reign supreme. yet considerable evidence shows that
marginalized groups, including racial and ethnic minorities, gays and lesbi-
ans, women, and persons with disabilities, are often treated unfairly by their
peers and professors.27 in november 2001, the Review of Higher Education
estimated that at least one million bias-motivated incidents—ranging from
relatively minor acts of vandalism to serious episodes of violence—occur on
American college and university campuses each year, the vast majority of
which are never reported to school or law enforcement authorities.28
in the year following the 9/11 attacks, the American-Arab Anti-
Discrimination Committee (ADC) and the Council on American-islamic
relations (CAir) documented more than two hundred cases of physical
violence, threats, and harassment against Arab American and muslim
American students.29 The incidents began to accumulate almost immediately
after the collapse of the Twin Towers. A muslim student at Arizona state
University was pelted with eggs. muslim and Arab students at the University
of California at Berkeley received death threats and hate mail. Anti-muslim
signs were posted at indiana University in Bloomington. vandals smashed
the windows of the msA office at Wayne state University in Detroit. Two
men beat a lebanese student on the campus of the University of north
Carolina at Greensboro. The men yelled, “Go home terrorist!” as they
repeatedly punched the victim in the face. Arab and muslim children in
elementary and secondary schools faced similar problems, and muslim
teachers and professors were harassed and, in some cases, unlawfully dis-
missed from their jobs.
The undergraduate and graduate students who participated in this study
recounted a number of incidents of discrimination on their college campuses.
At one of the universities in manhattan, an angry mob gathered outside the
Backlash / 87
student center and began chanting, “i hate muslims.” They stopped only after
someone called building security. One of the muslims at the school described
the scene: “A big group of students were all gathered around shouting, ‘i hate
muslims; i hate muslims.’ Those people around them are laughing at that.
nobody said anything to them. it is really the worst i have seen. They only
wanted to stop after the security guards arrived.”
some college professors singled out muslim students and subjected them
to hostile comments. The muslim men and women who suffered from bias in
the classroom felt mostly powerless to respond, in part because they believed
their course grades depended on their relationships with the teachers.
Therefore, victims of this form of hostili
ty usually chose to remain silent in
the face of verbal slights. shafana described what happened to her friend, a
young woman who had the unfortunate distinction of sharing the same last
name as ramzi yousef, the terrorist convicted of planning the 1993 bombing
of the World Trade Center: “One of my friends is in law school. Her last
name is yousef. When she was in class, the professor talked about history.
somehow they got onto the topic of the World Trade Center. And because the
man in the last bombing, his last name is yousef, the professor said, ‘Well,
miss yousef, what do you think about this?’ she felt so pinpointed.” i asked
shafana if her friend said anything in response to the teacher. she laughed
and said, “no way! Are you kidding? This guy would have failed her.”
A few of the interviewees believed that professors had given them lower
grades on assignments as a result of anti-muslim prejudice. One young
woman, neva, noted that her political science instructor had made several
negative comments about islam in class in the weeks following the 9/11
attacks. When she received her first assignment back, the teacher had given
her a low grade but offered no clear explanation for why the paper had been
marked down:
my teacher gave me a C– on an assignment. There were no marks on
it, nothing. The only comment is “This isn’t at all what i expected.”
i could not understand what she meant. so i am trying to decide
whether i should talk to her about it. This teacher has been making
negative comments all semester about islam. i think this grade must
be religiously motivated. Or maybe she is racist? But then i blame
myself, maybe if i would have gone to the writing lab and had it
checked first.
even though her professor had made hateful remarks about muslims and
islam on numerous occasions, neva still felt self-doubt and self-blame
regarding the low grade that she received.
88 / Chapter 4
in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks, educators, many of whom were
struggling with their own feelings of loss and anger and fear, were confronted
with difficult student questions about the causes and consequences of 9/11. The
students in this study reported that many of their professors avoided the subject
altogether. Other professors acknowledged their own limited understanding