Post 9/11 America & the Rise of Islamophobia

After the terrorist attack historically remembered as the date it happened—9/11—took place, a resurgence of discrimination towards those of the Islam religion followed. This has led to the often ignorant perception of particular individuals having some sort of connection to the event and the hatred it displayed. As many judgments are, this perception is often rooted entirely in physical appearance. The visible markers of the Islam faith, as well as other religions such as Sikh, often result in the grouping of all of these individuals simply because of the turban that accompanies their everyday attire. Darsh Singh, a Sikh individual, is among one of these people. He described his appearance as being the visual embodiment of the enemy. Although in some ways society has made great strides in the emphasis placed on activism to reconstruct a number of these social issues, a paper titled Islamophobia in post 9/11 America states that “recent statistical data concerning the scope and nature of American Islamophobia, suggest[s] that the phenomenon is still on the rise in some respects” (Cluck, 2008). Equality will likely not be achieved until Islamophobia is no longer a normalized concept in any human language.