9/11 anniversary: The towers came down and hate spilled forth

Twenty-five years ago, terrorists attacked America. 

9/11 united us ... and divided us. The comfort of "polite society" is often just a thin veneer for communities of color—a temporary ceasefire that lasts only until the next national crisis. When you compare the aftermath of September 11, 2001, to the COVID-19 pandemic, a clear pattern emerges: public fear is quickly turned into permission to hate.

Post-9/11 backlash

When the towers fell on 9/11, national trauma quickly morphed into open hostility toward anyone who didn't fit a traditional American image. Overnight, visible markers of faith and culture became targets. Muslim women wearing the hijab faced widespread harassment, but the anger didn't stop there. It targeted anyone perceived to be Middle Eastern or South Asian: Sikhs wearing turbans, any male with a dark beard, or people speaking Arabic.

Because of widespread public ignorance, the Sikh American community faced a severe brunt of this misplaced rage. Attacks against Sikh men were the immediate results.

• Explosion in Violence: FBI data showed that anti-Muslim hate crimes jumped over 1,600% in 2001 compared to the previous year.
  
  
• Impact on the Sikh Community: The Sikh Coalition documented over 300 acts of violence and discrimination in the first month alone, driven by attackers who didn't know — or care to know — the difference between a Sikh turban and the images on the news.
  
  
• The Ultimate Cost: Just four days after the attacks, Balbir Singh Sodhi, a Sikh gas station owner in Arizona, was murdered simply because of how he looked.
  
  

This hostility soon reached institutions. Discrimination lawsuits filed by the Trump regime's U.S. Department of Justice had to challenge employers like the New York Transit Authority, which tried to force Muslim and Sikh workers to remove their headwear or move out of public view. The message was simple: hide who you are, or stay out of sight.

COVID-19 and the return of old hostilities

Nearly two decades later, COVID-19 brought another massive crisis—this time a public health emergency. Once again, social norms collapsed almost immediately.

The underlying reaction was identical: take a common fear, find an easily identifiable group, and blame them. For Asian Americans, the pandemic revived old, harmful stereotypes of being "outsiders" or carrying disease. When public rhetoric labeled the health crisis the "Chinese Virus," it gave people an excuse to voice prejudice that had previously been kept quiet.

The data captured this sharp rise in hostility:

• Hate Crimes Doubled: Official FBI statistics showed anti-Asian hate incidents rising from 158 in 2019 to 746 in 2021.
  
  
• Widespread Incidents: Community tracking by Stop AAPI Hate logged over 6,600 self-reported cases of verbal abuse, shunning, and violence in the first year alone.
  
  
• Constant Fear: A Pew Research Center survey found that 81% of Asian Americans felt violence against their community was rising. In fact, 36% worried that wearing a protective face mask would draw unwanted suspicion, forcing people to choose between protecting their health and avoiding harassment on the street.
  
  

Pent-up hate broke down civil society.

Breaking the pattern

The Pandora's Box opened by 9/11 is still with us, allmost normalized and seeping into the institutions that were orignally supposed to protect us. 

We see it in the attacks against affirmative action and DEI policies, which weret attempts to open opportunities for people who don't have the economic means

 or have historically been denied thos opportunities;

We see it in the regime's immigration policies which have fallen mainly on people coming from countries other than Europe.

We see it in bureaucratic attempts to make it harder to vote, again falling on communities of color.

We see it in the political gerrymandering whose purpose is to deny ethnic enclaves from having more say on representation and policy making.

We see it in southern states resurrecting the statues extolling Confederate traitors.

We see it in the banning of books that tell the true history of the US or books that question the power structure and continues to perpetuate the myths of a white America

We see it in the threat to drastically reduce federal funding for programs designed to provide health care or services to people who normally can't afford it.

The hate incidents against Asian Americans, especially against South Asians, are continuing. Anti-South Asian slurs and violent threats in extremist online forums doubled between 2023 and 2024, remaining at high levels through 2025, according to data from Stop AAPI Hate.

The 9/11-fueled hate was still fa festering wound when the pandemic hit the US. It was like ripping off the scab and it was simple to expand hate attacks and feed the xenophobic fears against other Asians and Asian Americans. 

The 25th anniversary of attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon reminds us of how fragile social progress is when it relies on superficial politeness rather than real structural change. True safety won't come from waiting for mainstream attitudes to soften; it requires actively dismantling the underlying biases that make minority communities easy targets whenever a crisis strikes.

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