Resilient, Not Shaken: 25 Years Since 9/11 and the Path Forward for the US-based Sikh Community

NPQ’s column, We Stood Up, features first-person stories from workers, builders, activists, and organizers of their work and world. From inspirational stories to strategic insights and powerful solutions, these stories may offer a moment to breathe, collective wisdom, and the community solidarity we need to keep pushing toward a just and equitable future.

Twenty-five years ago, the smoke rising from the Twin Towers signaled a seismic shift in the American consciousness. For the Sikh community, the tragedy had a dual nature. First, we grieved as Americans for our fallen neighbors and the attack on the country we loved. Then, we steeled ourselves—knowing that we would be forced to defend our very right to exist against a tidal wave of hate, profiling, and violence.

While 9/11 shook our sense of place, it never shook who we are.

The post-9/11 era was undoubtedly a formative event that shook the sense of how Sikhs viewed ourselves within the American fabric. Our very visibility—including articles of faith like turbans and uncut hair, but also brown skin, accents, and other aspects of our intersectional identities—was weaponized against us by those who chose ignorance over pluralism. Out of that crisis, the Sikh Coalition and many other organizations were born, joining a burgeoning ecosystem of institutions dedicated to ensuring that no Sikh should have to choose between their faith and their safety.

However, as we reflect on this quarter-century milestone, we must be clear about one thing: While 9/11 shook our sense of place, it never shook who we are. The resilience we continue to see from Sikhs today is not a new phenomenon, but the continuation of a legacy that has defined our people for centuries. In the past two years alone, our community has marked profound milestones that anchor our resolve.

First, we recently observed the 350th Shaheedi Purab (martyrdom anniversary) of Guru Tegh Bahadur Sahib, who laid down his life to protect the religious freedom of those of faiths other than his own. In 1675, the Guru courted arrest by Emperor Aurangzeb of the Mughal Empire to directly challenge the ruler’s campaign to pressure Kashmiri Hindu Pandits into religious conversion. Guru Tegh Bahadur and three of his companions were brutally executed for refusing to turn away from their own faith, marking a critical historical moment in defense of the religious freedom of others that inspires Sikhs around the world to this day.

Additionally, we commemorated the 30th Shaheedi of Bhai Jaswant Singh Khalra, who himself disappeared into the machinery of state violence while documenting the disappeared in Punjab. Bhai Khalra was originally a finance professional by trade, but he chose to pursue justice for Sikh families robbed of their loved ones during the “decade of disappearances” that had followed the Sikh Genocide of 1984. He fought in Indian courts and traveled the world raising awareness about the continued extrajudicial targeting of Sikhs, ultimately paying with his life when he was abducted and killed by Punjab police in 1995.

Each of these instances are reminders that the Sikh resolve to fight for justice is woven into our psyche. When 9/11 spawned a new generation of activists who have dedicated their careers to the pursuit of defending and expanding Sikh civil rights in this country, our community didn’t just survive the post-9/11 backlash; we transformed our collective pain into a movement for justice.

To be clear, it is also a historical fallacy to suggest that Sikh activism in the United States began only when the towers fell. Long before 2001, the Ghadar Party was organizing for revolution and dignity from the streets of San Francisco and Astoria. Pioneers like Dr. Narinder Singh Kapany and Dr. Gurmit Singh Aulakh spent decades lobbying and organizing, and individuals such as Dr. Amarjit Singh Marwah built political power in and for our community. This spirit of standing up to power and fighting for the rights of Sikhs to define ourselves and our history has always been embedded in our culture and our being.

We wanted every legal victory for a Sikh to keep his turban to also allow a Jew his yarmulke or a Muslim her hijab.

At the same time, the brand of bigotry that surged forth from 9/11 was a new challenge for our community. Sikhs faced a barrage of hate crimes and bias incidents; per FBI data today, we consistently remain among the top three most frequently targeted religious groups in the United States despite our comparatively small population size. Sikhs also saw serious challenges in workplace discrimination, where they were ordered to remove their articles of faith, brand them with employers’ logos, or shift to positions out of the public—that is, the paying customer’s—eye. Sikh youth, especially those who maintained their own articles of faith at a young age, bore a particular burden of vicious and persistent bullying, from casual insults like “terrorist” to horrific physical assaults. In a sense, all of this hatred came to a head with the violent attack on a Sikh gurdwara (house of worship) in Oak Creek, WI, in 2012; seven worshippers ultimately lost their lives when a White nationalist and neo-Nazi stormed the facility, making it one of the worst attacks on a house of worship in US history at the time.

Yet our community persisted through all of these challenges. We stood up legal defenses for Sikhs who were targeted, securing hate crime convictions, settlements from public and private sector enterprises, and safety plans for students in need. We pushed for policy changes, from reforms to hate crime laws to religious accommodations policies to the inclusion of Sikhi alongside other world religions in social studies curricula. We strove to inspire a generational shift in Sikh awareness among the US population by producing educational materials, engaging the media, and equipping our sangats (local communities) with the tools they needed for outreach—putting ourselves and our faith out for the curious public despite the persistent threat from some corners of the population.

Critically, we did our best to do all of this collective work in the Sikh spirit of sarbat da bhala—for the good of all. We wanted every legal victory for a Sikh to keep his turban to also allow a Jew his yarmulke or a Muslim her hijab. We wanted every hate crime law that protected religion as a class to do the same for sexual orientation and gender identity. We wanted every advancement in inclusive curriculum to include not just the contributions of Sikhs and other Asian Americans, but also those of Black Americans and other historically marginalized groups. In both modern US history and Sikh history (for example, the above-referenced case of Guru Tegh Bahadur Sahib), we have seen time and again that meaningful strides forward in civil and human rights are always made working in concert with other groups—and never at their expense.

Our identity is not a liability; it is our greatest strength.

As we look toward the next 25 years, we must recognize that even though the challenges Sikhs face are great, we are not starting from zero. Our focus is shifting from simply asking for safety and requesting our rightful seat at the table to expecting safety, inclusion, and respect—and building tables on our own. While the echoes of 9/11 remain, accompanied by new threats in the modern context, we are now shaping policy, influencing decision makers, and ensuring that the Sikh voice is a permanent, prominent fixture in the American story.

If the last 25 years have taught us anything, it is that our identity is not a liability; it is our greatest strength. We remain unbowed, unbroken, and entirely certain of who we are.