‘There is so much fear in Kent’ five months after Sikh shooting

Sharn Kaur expects questions about the turban she wears every day.

“I always get questions,” she said.

Especially when she’s working as a Starbucks barista in Tukwila.

Kaur is a Sikh, one of about 25 million in the world.

Adherents of the peaceful religion, Sikhs, many of which wear turbans, have been the victims of hate crimes locally and nationally in the past decade.

On Saturday (Aug. 5), Kaur, 21, is organizing a park cleanup in Seattle to commemorate the fifth anniversary of a mass shooting in Wisconsin.

The National Day of Seva (selfless community service) remembers and honors the victims and the survivors of the Oak Creek tragedy. It’s one of 15 nationwide.

Kaur expects about 40 people from Olympia to Kent to volunteer.

Racist incidents against Sikhs increased after the 9/11 attacks, despite Sikhs having no relationship to the hijackers’ religion or culture.

It reached a tragic peak in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, on Aug. 5, 2012, when a white supremacist with Neo-Nazi ties murdered six people and wounded others inside a gurdwara, or Sikh house of worship.

“That is something the Sikh community will never forget,” Kaur said.

In March, a Sikh man working on a car in his Kent driveway said he was shot by a man who told him, “go back to your own country,” after an exchange of words.

Discrimination of Sikhs in Washington goes back to the early 1900s, when Bellingham loggers attacked hundreds of Sikh mill workers and drove them from town.

Kaur, who teaches a martial arts class at the Khalsa Gurmat Center in Renton, has lived in Kent for 19 years and serves on the city’s cultural communities board. The position has given her a sense of civic duty.

“That’s what built the fire inside me to go out there and make a difference,” she said.

There also was the Kent shooting.

“It made me want to get more into it,” the political science student said. “Social justice is part of the religion — standing up against oppression and fighting for what you believe in.”

The shooting has changed her lifestyle.

“I used to be able to ride my bike,” she said. Now her parents forbid it.

“There is so much fear in Kent,” Kaur said. “It’s a sad thing.”

She’s worn a turban for eight years and welcomes questions, she said. So far, they’ve all been positive.

Others in her social group haven’t had the same experience.

“What are you hiding under there?” she said her friends have been asked. “Is there a bomb under there?”

Still, she welcomes all to satisfy their curiosity.

“Sikhs are very much open, loving people,” she said. “Don’t be afraid to ask someone why they wear a turban, why they wear a bracelet.”

Knowledge, she said, replaces ignorance and fear.

This story was originally published August 4, 2017 at 9:00 AM with the headline "‘There is so much fear in Kent’ five months after Sikh shooting."