Here’s a video that I produced back in 2010 with Mou Khan, for SAALT’s An America For All Of Us campaign. SAALT’s been using it for trainings for a while, and just posted it to Youtube. It’s about how South Asian, Muslim, Arab and Sikh communities have been affected by post-9/11 laws and attitudes; we hit four different cities and interviewed something like 17 people from as many organizations. I talked to DRUM’s Monami Maulik again in April for a Colorlines piece about the end of NSEERS, a jaw-droppingly racist program that led to mass deportations and the economic collapse of a lot of Arab and South Asian neighborhoods.
My big takeaway from working on this project (which shouldn’t have been that surprising, but you know) is how similarly the system works in any community of color, in Queens and in Bushwick and in Chinatown and in Arizona and in Navajo Nation. I know, intellectually, that the government’s racially biased immigration/anti-terror/stop-and-frisk laws laws are keeping communities of color poor, and it’s that poverty keeps them vulnerable to such laws. But realizing how this is happening with literally every non-white group in America, without exception, was an oh-shit-duh moment that I value.
