Soon, ads pushing back against hate on American Sikhs will hit airwaves.
Leaders and families in the U.S. Sikh community have launched a campaign, “We are Sikhs,” in the face of rising anti-Muslim, hate-centric rhetoric and crimes, according to the Associated Press. Ads showing everyday American Sikhs will air on CNN, Fox News and in Fresno, California, as well as show online.
The ads were created to show that Sikh values align with American values. “We teach our kids the American values go hand in hand with the Sikh values: tolerance, religious freedom, gender equality,” one Sikh man in a turban says in one of the ads, according to AP.
Sikhs saw one of their own shot in an apparent hate crime last month in Seattle, on his own driveway, by an angry man who told him to “go back to [his] country.” That was following an incident inside a Kansas bar that saw one Indian American man killed, and another shot, by a man who thought he was shooting Middle Easterners.
The Sikh religion originates in India, and is the fifth-largest faith in the world. Still, polls show that most Americans “know nothing at all” about Sikhism.
Gurwin Ahuja, one of the campaign’s organizers and a former staffer under President Barack Obama, said that children on White House tours would ask, based on his appearance, whether he was a member of the Taliban. “When people see us, they think we’re either religious extremists or terrorists,” Ahuja said.
The AP reported that more than 300 Sikhs have reported hate crimes since 9/11, while the Federal Bureau of Investigation said that, in 2016, 139 violent incidents occurred against mosques in the U.S.
Elsewhere in the American Sikh community, efforts to stop hate violence have included the #LoveMyNeighbor campaign by the Sikh Coalition, which urges people to resist xenophobia and to empower those who are being targeted.
Earlier this month, the Coalition enlisted the help of congressional lawmakers to write a letter to President Donald Trump with the message to provide more resources for fighting race-fueled violence and to begin a national dialogue on combating hate crimes.
“We are alarmed at the growing number of hate-related crimes and threats of violence in our country,” the letter reads. “It is important to remember that these statistics represent individual lives and each incident reverberates throughout our communities.”
