Sikh Americans were profoundly affected by 9/11 since Sikhs were singled out disproportionately for violence.

The issues confronting the Sikh American community can broadly be classified into three categories:

a. Ignorance About Sikhs and Sikhism
A majority of the citizens of our nation had never heard about Sikhs.
This was the primary reason that Sikhs were mistaken to be associated with Osama Bin Laden and the Taliban. This ignorance existed in the federal, state and local governments.

b. Hate Crimes/Racial Profiling
Until 9/11 the majority of the Sikh American population was not aware of hate crimes and racial profiling. Many in the community did not know what these terms meant, how to identify such incidents and what to do if one is a victim of a hate crime or racial profiling.

c. Discrimination
Members of the Sikh American community have endured employment, public accommodation, and housing discrimination since the first Sikhs came to the USA. Such problems still exist and have become especially acute after 9/11. Unfortunately these are severely underreported, primarily due to a lack of education in the community about their legal rights related to
discrimination. Hence the overwhelming number of discrimination cases go unchallenged and without any redress for the victims.

From its inception SMART has initiated several campaigns to address these issues. Since 9/11 we have increased our efforts and added additional resources to proactively tackle these. Our current programs can be categorized into four areas.

1) Advocacy: The goal of this program is to deepen our contacts with national and local law enforcement and security agencies. We had to scramble to do this reactively after 9/11, but now we are doing this systematically across the board. We have done outreach to city and state police, and are continuing to build our contacts with federal agencies.

2) Community Education: We have launched a major push to do outreach to the community and inform them more about their rights. We think the community is more receptive now, whereas previously there was a lack of concern with these issues.

3) Media Action: Since the begining we have played the key role of a media watchdog, constantly monitoring the US media for any misrepresentation of Sikhs. Over the past five years we have become good at reacting to media misrepresentation, but have now made a shift to working with them ahead of time to increase understanding of Sikhs. We are concerned that post 9/11 shallow understanding of Sikhs as victims is insufficient and will quickly be forgotten.

4) Legal Action: We are working to build our legal capacity so that we can continue to build on our rights by establishing solid precedent. The three main areas of legal action are:

a. discrimination, primarily in employment and public accomodation
b. racial profiling
c. hate crimes