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M. Shahid Alam
Economics Professor
When I crossed the border into the United States in 1988, after teaching in Canada for two years, I had the curious feeling that my wife, my son, and I, still brown-skinned and dark-haired, had somehow become invisible.
We walked the streets of Hamilton, Utica, and Syracuse in New York—each town predominantly white—without attracting any unwanted attention. Motorists did not gawk at us while we waited at the curb for the walk signal. At restaurants, no heads turned in our direction. The shoppers in stores did not greet our entry with quizzical, perplexed looks nor follow our very steps. Even our neighbors left us alone.
I was relieved at this loss of visibility. It was a signal change from my Canadian experience. The only time I felt comfortable stepping outside the campus in London, Western Ontario, was in the winter months, when bundled in jacket, hood, scarf, and gloves, I became nearly indistinguishable from everyone else. In the summer, when I had to shed these sartorial covers, I ventured out only at night, under a mantle of darkness.
I enjoyed this invisibility even at my teaching job at Northeastern. Yes, there was a little edginess when I first entered a classroom, a mild dismay in anticipation of the strange accents of “another Indian professor.” For the most part, I managed to lay these fears to rest, and week after week, my students would concentrate on what I had to say, undistracted by who said it. But this invisibility proved to be fragile.
When I began to depart from the scripted text, drawing attention to the ideological intent of economics, its Eurocentric biases and disregard for facts, not a few of my students began to take a harder look at me. My ethnicity and origins began to obstruct their view; I became proof against my own critique. This reminded me of the philosopher Immanuel Kant’s disdainful remark about a critic: “This fellow was quite black from head to foot, a clear proof that he was stupid.”
Then, all of a sudden, September 11 introduced a new dynamic. The nineteen hijackers of Arab background and the planes crashing into the twin towers had unleashed a fury that would rearrange many lives. The first massive attack on Americans on U.S. soil had shaken the nation. And America shaken was America united against anyone who seemed to be related to the perpetrators of this undeserved and “unprovoked” act of violence. Almost instantly, I could sense that this anger, volcanic and intense, would reorder the world in a hurry.
And so it did. Almost as soon as I walked into the Attleboro train station the next day, I noticed a change. One by one, heads turned towards me, as if they’d recognized a face from a Wanted poster. The commuters now felt uncomfortable in my presence. In their newborn sense of insecurity, they had sensed a connection between me and the hijackers. My Pakistani ethnicity was indistinguishable from the Arab background of the hijackers. A crust of visibility began to thicken around me. Was I back in Canada?
The subsequent events have revealed a rigorous working out of the logic immanent in the attack of September 11. The world was quickly painted in two unmistakable colors: white and black. “You are either with us, or you are with the terrorists.” This would be a Manichaean contest between the United States, symbolizing infinite justice and enduring freedom, and Osama bin Laden, commanding the evil hordes of Islamic totalitarianism.
Instantly, Pakistan was given a “second chance.” After that, the attack on Afghanistan unfurled: The mightiest concentration of force in human history was deployed against a war-ravaged, famine-stricken country. The smart bombs, the cluster bombs, the daisy-cutters, the bunker-busters began to descend on Afghanistan. And not a few fell in the wrong places.
Two additional fronts were opened up. Osama would have to be starved of funds. Political parties, financial institutions, charities, and individuals were accused of links to Al Qaeda, and their assets were frozen. More ominously, America began a quick descent into a Hobbesian state, where the liberties of some Americans and all aliens would be traded for the security of other Americans.
The attack of September 11 led to an instant boom in racial profiling of Muslims. The FBI was empowered to tap phones and enter homes without notice. Aliens, legal and illegal, could be held without trial for as long as a year. All aliens—some 20 million—could be tried in secrecy by military courts and hanged without a unanimous verdict.
I am thankful in these dangerous times to be on sabbatical—away from any teaching duties. This frees me at the right time from the unpleasant task of curtailing my own speech. Cloistered in my academic cell, I can become invisible.
I did, however, in the first few weeks after September 11, put up an American flag on my office door. When a colleague commended me for my patriotism, I answered that I was only exercising my right of free speech—or what was left of it. It was a comic gesture—attempting to regain what I had lost in the aftermath of September 11. My invisibility.
M. Shahid Alam is a professor of economics in the College of Arts and Sciences.