Browsing Tag: Prejudice

“I used to complain many times about why I’m going through all these hardships, and then I realized that those experiences actually shaped me into the being I am today,” Singh said. “Those experiences make me who I am.”

Baljit Singh, secretary of the Hastings Sikh Temple, says in the 25 years he has been in Hawke's Bay he has not experienced any racism towards him or any members of the wider Indian community.

On the other hand, we all regularly participate in a system that protects a select few, and we all play roles that contribute to the denigration of others.

Scholars have recently described this perceived relationship as a racialization of religious identity. This process has led to a conflation of Sikhs and Muslims, and therefore, has produced a corollary to Islamophobia -- Sikhophobia.

It's this sort of optimism that makes me believe that "looking different" has played a significant role in my way of "looking differently."

A memory which I still have very vividly in my mind, the first time I was truly scared. It was the day before the last day of school, I was in 3rd grade and just like with great movies, the memory starts with an action sequence.

Unfortunately for you and our other LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) brothers and sisters, you are born into one of the most hetero-male dominated culture ever. And we thought our lives as straight men or women were tough?

....it is nevertheless disheartening to see a Sikh institution -- representing the legacy of Guru Nanak -- aligning itself with such reactionary and anti-gay ideology, when Sikhism itself is a freedom-seeking, loving, open-minded philosophy and way of life.

After she passed us, she turned around and said something I would never forget: “If you don’t know which door to open, go back to your country.”

This is certainly not the kind of “attention” we need nor desire. Sikhs have been trying to educate the American public on who we are and particularly so in the last decade, and now what most people know is the action of one person who decided to take legal recourse.

As someone who practices religion personally and studies religion academically, this story tears me up inside. There's so much I want to say about this. A lot of it is probably obvious, and a lot has already been said. But I do think this story raises an important question that we tend to overlook.

For religious minorities in the United States, the promise of religious freedom remains unfulfilled. Sikh Americans, in particular, continue to face relentless challenges in the post-9/11 environment. Worse still, American law affords inadequate protection to Sikhs against religious discrimination and, in some cases, reflects deep-seated stereotypes about American identity.

The large majority of those who visit India may not see or recognize the grim realities that disable the lives of about 170 million people in the country’s Dalit community. For the women and girls of this community, trapped in two straitjackets of caste and gender, the constraints and barriers have few parallels.

For a faith that has in many ways been based on the irrelevance of caste, Sikhs spend a lot of time obsessing over it. The latest trend in caste oneupsmanship is to pour over our history and start splitting the great Sikh personalities by caste.

"Sikhs were mistaken to be Arabs in the post 9/11 scenario and beaten up. Doesn't this sound bizarre? I mean Sikhs and Arabs are as different as chalk and cheese. And that is what I have attempted to show in this film. It talks about the turban issue."

We must stop considering the different brain structure of autistic individuals to be a deficiency, as research reveals that many autistics – not just “savants” – have qualities and abilities that may exceed those of people who do not have the condition...

I’m talking about experiencing the hidden, indirect racism we tell ourselves does not exist in the Great White North (I won’t even go there!). Perhaps we’ve just been fortunate to have such great friends from diverse backgrounds. Let me make it known though, it is happening in Canada.

For Sikh Americans, reflecting on 9/11 brings many emotions.

September 15, 2010 -- Nine years ago today, the murder of a family friend changed the course of my life. His name was Balbir Singh Sodhi.

And yet sitting in stalled traffic, I cannot shake the irrational feeling that "those in the other cars" are different from "us in our car." If my mind seems intent upon making such ludicrous and meaningless distinctions, is there more here than meets the purely psychological I?

Working at a store isn’t all about money; it’s about seeing the people down on their luck and giving them hope. It’s about looking at that little kid whose mom has money to buy herself a can of beer but can’t afford a 25 cent candy for her kid...

Canadian Sikhs are wondering, why the double standard? While violence and looting in Montreal last night after the victory of the Montreal Canadians over the Pittsburgh Penguins has been attributed to a “small” group of 500 individuals, the entire Canadian Sikh community has been smeared by certain politicians and media as violent and prone to extremism due to the irresponsible comments and actions of a few.

Why might so many Canadians hold such inaccurate views of Sikhism? The article speculates that media coverage of complex social, economic, or political issues may oversimplify matters, leading to erroneous "reductive reasoning" in which readers tend to wrongly attribute religion as the cause.

Waking early in the morning is a camp routine for all the Sikhs, but poor little Simar naturally doesn’t like it.

Dallas Firm Accused Of Religious Discrimination.

A Muslim-style turban is perceived as a threat, according to a new study,...