A panel of scholars from across the country met Friday to discuss ways to educate the public about the Aug. 5 Oak Creek Sikh temple shooting by connecting it to greater issues involving racism and violence.
To connect what happens in smaller-scale terrorist incidents, such as the Oak Creek shooting, to current larger issues, UW-Madison professor Donald Davis said it is necessary to determine if such incidents are “just a weirdo acting out” or if they are linked to greater global and national problems.
“The purpose [of the panel discussion] is to think about what scholars of South Asia can and should be doing to educate people about incidents like this to help make sense of why they happen,” Davis said.
According to University of Pittsburgh professor Rashmi D. Bhatnagar, who chaired the discussion, the media did not provide sufficient analysis about the Oak Creek incident for her to engage her students in a constructive discussion about racially motivated violent acts.
“It doesn’t just happen, this kind of violence,” Bhatnagar said. “It happens when there are certain kinds of discussions already going on in the community and certain kinds of everyday hostility going on.”
Bhatnagar referred to the Oak Creek shooting as a “wake-up” call for scholars and teachers to compare a current violent act to others throughout history.
“[The discussion] outlined the work we can do in a scholarly way as academics,” Bhatnagar said. “But it did so by [highlighting] how we need to think of the Oak Creek moment as not just one more hate crime but as requiring some real historicizing.”
Davis said it is important for scholars who often get stuck in the “proverbial ivory tower,” which refers to academics who speculate issues in isolation from the real world, to avoid reducing the panel to a complex discussion of theory and instead address issues of racial violence in terms people can understand.
“We should feel some responsibility for certain kinds of things,” Davis said. “[It’s important] to ensure we redirect our focus to the specific incidents in Oak Creek instead of seeing it as simply another group who simply suffered violence.”
