IN HIS INTRODUCTION to American Hate, Arjun Singh Sethi warns readers: “The pages that follow are not for the faint of heart, but neither is this moment.”
The hate crime survivors he spotlights speak with the stunned, searching voices of aggrieved neighbors: Syrian Muslims, Sikhs, Lebanese Christians, African Americans, Southeast Asians, Jews, and Native Americans. Sethi, a 37-year-old Sikh lawyer from Washington, D.C., shatters the complacent notion that hate crimes in the U.S. target only Muslims or unlucky Sikhs mistaken for Muslims.
Sethi’s book is evidence of the current civic plague of top-down moral dysfunction. President Trump, he writes, while “exercising the worst form of bully pulpit,” has “emboldened, empowered, enabled, facilitated, and legitimatized the very worst in America: racism, xenophobia, Islamophobia, sexism, anti-Semitism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, and anti-immigrant hostility.”
Sethi’s pained witness can doubtlessly be traced to his own history of being bullied growing up, even as he absorbed his community’s culture of empathy for other targeted communities and, sometimes, for the perpetrators. In August 2012, a white supremacist massacred six Sikhs at their Oak Creek, Wis. gurdwara (place of worship). “When the Sikh community later gathered,” Sethi writes, “they recited their holy prayer, the ardaas, and mourned those they lost. But they also prayed for the soul of the shooter.”
The damaged souls of perpetrators emerges as a theme in more than one of the book’s accounts of the pain, solitude, and resurrected lives of survivors and their families. Sethi documents one of the FBI’s 6,121 reported hate crimes in 2016: the murder of Khalid Jabara, a Lebanese-Christian killed by Stanley Vernon Majors in Tulsa, Okla. Majors, the Jabara family’s next-door neighbor, hurled racial epithets at them for years and had previously run over Haifa Jabara, Khalid’s mother, with his car. Majors was out on bond when he shot Khalid to death. Having learned that Majors was abandoned by his mother when he was 3 months old, and his only home growing up was his father’s car, Victoria Jabara, Khalid’s sister, expressed compassion: “The guy next door didn’t have a community. Maybe he never did.”
In the age of social media, Sethi observes, a hate crime is not necessarily a crime of physical violence. It can also be psychological violence. Tanya Gersh, a Jewish real estate agent from Whitefish, Mont., and Taylor Dumpson, the first African-American woman to be elected student government president at American University in D.C., were both cyber-harassed by The Daily Stormer neo-Nazi website. After a dispute arose between Gersh and white nationalist/alt right leader Richard Spencer’s mother, the Stormer posted pictures of Gersh and her family, along with their phone numbers, email addresses, and street address, inviting readers to bring their indignation to her doorstep. She was tormented by hundreds of calls and emails with comments such as “Thanks for demonstrating why your race needs to be collectively ovened.”
On Dumpson’s first full day in office as AU’s student body president, bananas were found hanging from nooses made of black nylon rope on the campus. In response to news stories about the incident, Daily Stormer publisher Andrew Anglin mocked Dumpson on his site and encouraged a troll storm against her.
Both Gersh and Dumpson were later diagnosed with PTSD.
Sethi laments the dearth of a public outcry against hate crimes. But he points to interfaith communities such as those in Victoria, Texas, that helped rebuild the local mosque that was burned to the ground the week Trump signed the first Muslim travel ban, and in Tulsa, where the B’nai Emunah Congregation named its preschool library the Khalid Jabara Tikkun Olam Library.
Sethi’s book is a wake-up call. It is impossible to read American Hate and go back to sleep.
Robert Hirschfield is a poet and journalist in New York City whose work has appeared in the National Catholic Reporter, the Jewish Review of Books, and other publications. His new poetry collection is The Road to Canaan (Presa Press).
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