Bracing for the Backlash

We have remarked before on the problematic nature of minority advocates in the war on terror. But we could not have made our point so clearly or so well as it is being made for us by ADC-NY and the Sikh Coalition’s new proposed legislation to the New York City Council.

The Sikh Coalition recently drafted the Backlash Mitigation Bill, introduced on February 15th by Councilman David Weprin. The bill would amend the City Charter to require the Office of Emergency Management to establish a ‘backlash mitigation plan’ to be implemented immediately following any event that may initiate backlash or in anyway inspire violence against minority groups. This would necessarily mean further expansion of city security measures, the devotion of still more resources toward disaster anticipation, and the creation of an official mandate for the police and other government officials to interject themselves into the lives of minorities that they determine to be “at-risk communities” -- with the “community” being, again, left up to them to define. The Sikh Coalition describes the Backlash Mitigation Bill as taking “huge steps for the New York City Sikh community”, while ADC-NY has told members in an email to come out in force on Sunday to support this “important piece of civil rights legislation that aims to stem the tide of anti-Arab hatred in this city.”

The bill must, of course, reach back to the immediate aftermath of 9/11 in order to present any findings that Arabs, Muslims, or Sikhs are placed in any danger in New York. Yet the statistics suggest New Yorkers of those ethnicities experience no meaningful risk of danger. And even if the number of incidents after 9/11 were high, the only reason this would lead one to lobby for a plan to stave off backlash is if one expected that a) more terrorist attacks are likely, and b) that New Yorkers are irrational, hateful people who can only be expected to respond to a disaster by lashing out indiscriminately at minority groups. Crucially, both assumptions—that more terrorism is on the way and that there are lots of hateful individuals out there who, if not prevented by government, will try to “get us”—are central tenets of the war on terror.

Perhaps the most absurd aspect of these minority groups’ demand for a “backlash mitigation” bill is the very notion that such a bill could provide any kind of remedy to the threats, even assuming for a moment that the threats were real. As the New York Daily News quipped, “Backlash Mitigators in action, Weprin envisions, would ‘build relationships with community and religious leaders,’ and ‘air public service announcements condemning violence’ and ‘train police officers’ and just, you know, generally stand around mitigating.” Indeed, the ill-defined nature of the project is summed up by the fact that it hopes only to "mitigate" the backlash, not even to prevent it.

Public service announcements condemning violence against minorities are merely the flip side of the “See Something, Say Something” coin. Both allow the government to appear as though it is taking action, while their security effect is to reaffirm anxiety. Premised on an obsession with risk and a pessimism about the humanity of strangers, both campaigns serve to highlight the sinister and corrosive social impact of the war on terror.