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Dotbusting, P*ki-Bashing and Bangla-tour by Ahsun Zafar
The year is 1987. Ronald Reagan is president. The United States economy is hurting, and in the next few years it’ll get ugly. In the US state of New Jersey lies the small city of Jersey City, where the housing costs are low and New York City is not too far away, making it an ideal spot for immigrants. In the years to come, more newly arrived South Asians settle in the heart of Jersey City and begin to carve out a life for themselves.
The residents of Jersey City, who are majority white working class people, begin to notice their city is changing around them. Grocery stores and restaurants owned and ran by South Asians are popping up everywhere. The multiplex is playing Bollywood movies, and old businesses are closing down, only to be replaced by South Asian sweet shops. They’re witnessing first hand the formation of a community - a South Asian community - that is growing and thriving. Jersey City is not the only city going through a change, it is also happening in different pockets throughout the whole state. There was of course always some ethnic tension between the different communities in Jersey City but it was not as alarming as it would come to be.
Dot Busters
In one ordinary summer morning of July 1987, a local newspaper called the Jersey Journal published an article on the rising number of harassment cases towards South Asians in the city. It described how South Asians returning to their cars would find their windshields broken. Their homes and shops vandalized, hit with stones and bottles, and trash thrown all over their properties. It had become a hostile environment, and it was only a matter of time before it would reach a breaking point. That breaking point for the South Asian community of Jersey City came in the form of a letter.
A month later, the same newspaper published a handwritten letter they had received in response to the earlier published article on the treatment of South Asians in the city. It read,
“I’m writing about your article during July about the abuse of Indian People. Well I’m here to state the other side. I hate them, if you had to live near them you would also. We are an organization called dot busters. We have been around for 2 years. We will go to any extreme to get Indians to move out of Jersey City. If I’m walking down the street and I see a Hindu and the setting is right, I will hit him or her. We plan some of our most extreme attacks such as breaking windows, breaking car windows, and crashing family parties. We use the phone books and look up the name Patel. Have you seen how many of them there are? Do you even live in Jersey City? Do you walk down Central avenue and experience what its like to be near them: we have and we just don’t want it anymore. You said that they will have to start protecting themselves because the police cannot always be there. They will never do anything. They are a weak race Physically and mentally. We are going to continue our way. We will never be stopped.” - Signed by the “Jersey City Dot Busters.”
A month after the publication of the Dot Busters’ letter, a thirty-year-old South Asian Jersey City resident named Navroze Mody was confronted by a gang of dozen youths outside a bar. He was severely beaten into a coma and died four days later. Mody’s friend, who was with him outside the bar at the time, was left untouched. He was white.
A few days later, a 28-year-old physician named Kausal Saran is found lying unconscious near a city park. He was also beaten into a coma in broad daylight, and that too on a busy street corner. No witnesses come forward.
Saran’s coma lasted a month. Although he comes out of it, Saran suffers permanent brain damage. His long term and short memory is forever impaired and as a result, ends his medical career. Ironically, when the three men responsible for Saran’s attack are brought to trial, they would be let go free of all charges because the injuries from their attack left Saran with no memory of the crime and so, he was not able to to testify against them.
The South Asian community is paralyzed with fear. Women avoid wearing their traditional outfits and even bindis. They’re terrified of being the next target. Nobody dares to go out at night, and during the day, people walk in groups. Some even skip the night shifts at their jobs.
Hostility towards the community worsens. People are hassled and name-called in public. Women get spat on in broad daylight. The local temple is ransacked and desecrated. All the electronics and the idols of worship are stolen. A security guard could not be afforded so brave volunteers take turns sleeping in the temple every night. Shop owners in the neighbourhood put up a buzzer system for protection, so that anyone wanting to enter the store would have to be buzzed in.
One example is a reported case of a South Asian couple encountering a white mother with her infant during a stroll. When the infant son was about to fall down, the South Asian woman rushes to help the boy up, only to be slapped across the face from the mother. The mother yells at her, “Don’t ever touch my child.”
The attacks continue. In the next six months, there would be over 12 more reported cases throughout the state, just as brutal and cold as the first two. Keep in mind that these are only the cases that were ‘reported’ and there are likely countless other unreported cases of hate crimes.
These were all clearly racially motivated crimes, but the police and the administration refused to acknowledge them as such. The Mayor at the time may have condemned the violence in his speeches but instead of referring to the crimes as ethically motivated, he said, “maybe it’s a form of jealousy”.
If it is not labelled as ethnically motivated attacks then these crimes cannot be categorized for what they really are - hate crimes. It is important to do so because what separates hate crimes from non-hate crimes is that hate crimes go further than just the physical and verbal attack, it runs deep into the victim’s psyche and mental well being. Former FBI director James Comey in a speech said, “Hate crimes are different from other crimes. They strike at the heart of one’s identity. They strike at our sense of self, our sense of belonging. The end result is loss: loss of trust, loss of dignity, and in the worst case, loss of life.”
Hate crimes also move beyond the individual. Its effects can damage societies and communities. It is important to identify hate motivated crimes as hate motivated because if not, then the criminal justice system has failed to reflect the true extent of the harm done to the victim or victims.
Another key point here is that hate crimes increase and get worse if society doesn’t condemn them. If the police force and the administration stay silent about it then the individuals or groups of people who commit these acts of hate feel morally justified in their violence and their ideology. Silence fuels oppression. What could also happen is that a politician or a political party can start promoting that very ideology as a way of getting support and power. Trump is an example. If the broader community - politicians, police officers, the general public, etc, - stay quiet and do not effectively punish and publicly condemn the hate crimes, then perpetrators, such as the Dot Busters, feel encouraged to continue attacking minorities.
So, what can an oppressed minority community do? How do we go about fundamentally changing the way society works when it’s clearly so very dysfunctional and deeply built on toxic beliefs? How do the South Asian community of Jersey City dismantle a whole system and start again?