Model minority privilege and brown silence: Sikh Americans and the Black Lives Matter movement

ABSTRACT

As the nation was in flames following the murder of George Floyd at the hands of the Minneapolis Police Department, Sikhs across the nation stood with people of color in “the largest movement in U.S. history” to advocate for Black Lives Matter. Yet, Sikhs' relationship with law enforcement is much more complicated. This paper navigates through the complexity of Sikhs' relationship with law enforcement and the Black Lives Matter movement by using historical methods before discussing how religion influenced Sikh Americans to stand in solidarity against anti-Black racism.

KEYWORDS:

• Black Lives Matter
• Oak Creek Gurdwara
• police brutality
• Sikh activism

Acknowledgement

I want to acknowledge that this article is not to deny the difficulties, discrimination and violence that Sikhs have faced in the United States and abroad including at the hands of other people of color (i.e. a 19-year-old Black teenager was arrested and is facing hate crime charges for attacking Nirmal Singh in Richmond Hill, New York in April 2022). Furthermore, this is not to ignore the Sikh/Black solidarity that has occurred in the past – from Saint Nihal Sing’s 1908 article ‘Colour Line in the United States of America’ which draws parallels between British colonialism in South Asia and African American struggle for justice and equality in America to British Sikhs inviting Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcom X in 1964 and 1965, respectively. Nor is this meant to be an in-depth analysis about how Bhagat Singh Thind and some Sikhs fought to gain whiteness as a survival method. Rather, this article is meant to be an analysis on the Black Lives Matter Movement from a Sikhi perspective.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The initial shooting on August 5, 2012 killed six people, but a seventh died on March 2, 2020 as a result of his injuries. Baba Punjab Singh was shot in the head and was left partially paralyzed for more than seven years. His death was listed as a homicide.

2 Not only was the first hate crime after 9/11 against a Sikh American, but the fact that majority of turban-wearing individuals in the United States are Sikhs, they were heavily targeted.

3 For some Sikhs and people of color, the willingness to please white people is a survival method that may be the difference between life and death. While the purpose of this article is meant to be an analysis on the Black Lives Matter Movement from a Sikhi perspective, it is important to acknowledge that moments when Sikhs and communities of color aim to gain privileges that come with whiteness are not always clearly defined. A thorough analysis of these moments in history is needed to truly understand the motives behind why communities of color – during these specific moments – decided to align themselves with whiteness and please white people.

4 The Decade of Disappearances (1984 to 1995) refers to the years when over 25,000 Punjabi Sikhs ‘disappeared’ or were unlawfully murdered by the Indian government and Punjab police. Oftentimes, the narrative would be that Sikhs were killed in police ‘encounters,’ which forever gave the word ‘encounter’ a new definition for the Sikh community.

5 This number is significant considering that 6,017 of Khalra’s parital list of 25,000 (roughly 24% of the list) comes from 1 of the 22 districts in Punjab. In the same speech, Khalra said that the Sikh community says ‘about 50,000 to 1 million’ Sikh bodies were murdered; however, he pleaded to the Sikh diaspora in Canada to assist him in his work because people do not trust estimates, ‘they want exact figures.’ There is no exact way of knowing how many Sikhs were murdered since Khalra never had the opportunity to finish his work.

6 According to ‘The Widow Colony,’ at least 300 Sikh women were still missing more than 30 years after 1984.