Kavneet Singh says his Sikh religion is widely misunderstood and he believes that has led to a sharp increase in bias crimes. He recalls when images of Osama bin Laden, the founder of Al-Qaeda, flooded news reports after 9/11. Bin Laden wore a white turban. There was a subsequent increase in bias attacks on members of the American Sikh community, where men also wear turbans.
“The Bad Guy in 95 percent of the movies is a brown-skinned man with a scruffy beard and wearing a sloppy turban,” Singh notes.
Anti-Sikh hate crimes have been rising again, according to the FBI, up from 89 incidents in 2020 to 214 in 2021.
New Jersey is home to 100,000 Sikhs, including Hoboken Mayor Ravi Bhalla. Born in Passaic, Bhalla believes that political rhetoric has become more divisive since the Trump presidency, fostering hate crimes. According to Bhalla, the solution is education to familiarize people with the Sikh religion and lower the political temperature.
Bhupindar Singh, who leads New Jersey’s Sikh Youth Alliance, agrees. “We see … education and awareness as an important component which has the power to heal, which is a vaccine for the hate,” he said. The Alliance is trying to persuade local school boards to offer more education about the Sikh religion.
The New Jersey State Board of Education in 2009 required schools to do that but it’s not happening, according to a recent survey of 522 Sikh students by the Alliance. Bhupindar Singh says, “The majority of them responded they had learned very little about Sikhism in the classroom,” Bhupindar Singh said.
“We need this in our social studies book as a full chapter, if possible — not a little paragraph somewhere. A paragraph does not explain someone’s heritage and what they’re all about; there’s no context,” said Kavneet Singh.
