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On Sept. 15, 2001, a racist gunman murdered Balbir Singh Sodhi at Sodhi’s gas station in Mesa, Arizona.
Sodhi, a 52-year-old Sikh man who immigrated to the United States from India in 1989, was killed in a hate crime by a Frank Roque. The shooter, a white man, opened fire on Sodhi in response to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, prosecutors said. Roque apparently mistook Sodhi’s turban and beard as a sign of the Islamic faith and thought he had gunned down a Muslim man.
After killing Sodhi, Roque went on to shoot at a Lebanese American clerk who worked at another gas station, and the home of a family of Afghan descent. Fortunately, they were not injured.
Roque was unabashed about his bigotry when he was arrested.
He [Roque] was arrested and reportedly shouted: ‘‘I stand for America all the way,’’ as he was placed in handcuffs. Former colleagues testified at trial that Roque had long made racist remarks in public and, on the day of 9/11, had told a co-worker using racist slurs that he planned so-called reprisal attacks.
“We should round them all up and kill them. We should kill their children, too, because they’ll grow up to be like their parents,” Roque said.
Note how similar Roque's words sound to the sentiment we hear from present-day hate criminals (and their political associates). It’s not hard to imagine, for example, similar rhetoric being spewed by nationalistic supporters of former President Donald Trump. And for that reason, it strikes me that the United States has effectively vanquished the terrorism the nation witnessed on Sept. 11: the so-called radical Islamic extremism we’ve raised hell to fight. But we’ve done a much poorer job of weeding out the terrorism that exploded in the wake of that attack: xenophobic attacks. And not just by individual gunmen, but at the highest levels of government, too, which has surveilled and preyed upon Black and brown folks disproportionately.
The idea that racial and ethnic minority groups pose an existential threat to the U.S. may have seemed like a fringe concept to some in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks. But it’s arguably one of the most unifying beliefs in the conservative movement today. We see it in the right’s embrace of the racist “replacement theory,” which alleges Jewish people, Black folks and immigrants are engaged in a plot to destroy the American way of life. Trump has openly sowed racist hate toward Muslim people — whether that was before his presidency when he lied about “Arab” people cheering the Sept. 11 attacks, or during his presidency, when he sought to ban people from several majority-Muslim countries from entering the U.S.
As the conservative movement’s standard-bearer, Trump has helped bring racist extremism to the fore of the Republican Party.
And that’s heavy on my mind as I mourn the thousands lost to terrorism on Sept. 11, 2001, and many others harmed by or lost to xenophobic terrorism in the aftermath. In 2022, the Senate released a report concluding that domestic terrorism poses the greatest threat to U.S. national security. In the name of Balbir Singh Sodhi, the U.S. would do well to reflect on how narrow-minded the country's concept of terrorism has been in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks. Bearded brown men have been scapegoated as the faces of terrorism. But the numbers don’t lie: Bigoted white extremists are the bigger threats.