Shah Noor, who alleges police harassment. Haya El Nasser LONG BEACH, Calif. — Shah Noor, a recent transplant to California from Maryland, was driving through a nearby community one evening with his wife and stopped at a 7-Eleven to get some milk. A police car pulled up with lights flashing. Officers walked to their car and grilled them for 45 minutes. They were aggressive, he said, and asked what they were doing there, where they work. At one point, he saw the officer put his hand on his gun. “It was scary,” Noor said. “Pure harassment.” Police — Noor declined to identify the agency because of an ongoing investigation — cited him for talking on his cellphone while driving. He said the charge is bogus. “My phone had been dead for over three hours,” said Noor, 32, a lawyer who now runs JS Noor, a jewelry business. And the log on his wife’s cellphone shows no activity during that time. He’s convinced that racial profiling was in play. He wears a turban and has a beard. His wife, Stephanie, is African-American. And all of this happened within days of a mass shooting in San Bernardino carried out by a Muslim couple. After every attack on U.S. soil committed by Muslims, the backlash seems to increase. But hate crimes don’t target only Muslims. Noor is originally from India and is a Sikh, not an Arab or Muslim.

‘[Sikhism] preaches a message of devotion, remembrance of God at all times, truthful living, equality between all human beings, social justice, while emphatically denouncing superstitions and blind rituals.’ Sikh Coalition

‘Sikh adults were assaulted, Sikh children were bullied, places of worship were vandalized. Terrorist attacks lead to xenophobia and anyone who looks different is targeted, including Sikhs.’ Arjun Singh law and policy director, Sikh Coalition

There have been Sikhs in the U.S. for more than a century. Many came to build the railroads in the West. There is no accurate data on the number of Sikhs here, and estimates vary widely between 750,000 and 1.6 million, according to the coalition. Almost half of them live in California, the state with the largest Sikh population, but the densest concentration of Sikhs is in New York, Connecticut and New Jersey. The Sikh religion is a monotheistic religion that originates in the Punjab region of India. According to the coalition, it “preaches a message of devotion, remembrance of God at all times, truthful living, equality between all human beings, social justice, while emphatically denouncing superstitions and blind rituals.” “We were shocked after finding out about the graffiti,” said Jaspreet Singh, 40, on the board of the Buena Park gurdwara that was vandalized. “Especially the hate words being used.” For Sikhs who grew up in the U.S., harassment has been a way of life. For Noor, schoolyard teasing was common but never did he feel so much hatred as after 9/11. “You feel people don’t like you, like an outsider,” he said. People would call him “Osama” in reference to Osama bin Laden, the founder of Al-Qaeda, the group that claimed responsibility for the 9/11 attacks. They also called him “Taliban,” the armed fundamentalist movement in Afghanistan. “Sometimes, I would walk up to [the hecklers] and yell back, ‘I’m not a terrorist,’” Noor said. One time, someone pulled a knife on him in Wheaton, Maryland, a suburb of Washington. Another time, in Amsterdam, people in a car yelled out “bin Laden” at him, he said. When he yelled back, they followed him up an alley. He escaped. And there was another encounter with police in a Detroit suburb. He had a bracelet in his hand that he was playing with. Police mistook it for a masbaha, Muslim prayer beads. He showed them that it had a cross on it.