Dusky Peril

Dusky Peril was a term used in a full page article in the Puget Sound American, a daily newspaper from Bellingham, Washington, in its 16 September 1906 issue.[1] The term was used to describe the immigration of what it described as "Hindus" to the area,[2]

An article from the September 16, 1906, Puget Sound American describing recent "Hindu" immigration to Bellingham, Washington.

At the time, it was considered as an expression of xenophobia similar to the term Yellow Peril, that found practice in white and non-white countries across the globe in those times.[3] The term is analysed to have both an ethnic and a religious dimension. In fact, most of the immigrants from Punjab, India were Sikhs. The article is in response to the immigration of 17 individuals to the town.[4] The article's headline is "Have we a Dusky Peril: Hindu hordes invading the state" with the byline, "Bellingham workmen are becoming excited over the arrival of East Indians in numbers across the Canadian border and fear that the dusky Asiatics with their turbans will prove a worse menace to the working classes than the 'Yellow Peril' that has so long threatened the Pacific Coast."

South Asian-American reaction

Shefali Chandan writing in Jano conjectures that the emotions behind the circumstances that led to the ethnic cleansing of Bellingham in 1907, in which white mobs went door to door to locate East Indian immigrants and forced their expulsion, resulting in the entire community numbering about 200 or 300 leaving the town for good, found expression in the feature article written a year before.[5] Similarly, Rajan Gill discusses how the fear of the immigrants and racial prejudice depicted in the 1906 article culminated in the mob violence that occurred in Bellingham and throughout the Pacific Northwest.[6] The New York Times connected the anti-Sikh "hysteria" in the early 1900s exemplified by the views in the "dusky peril" article with the 2012 killing of six people in a Sikh temple in Wisconsin, and noted that prejudice continues to be faced by Sikhs serving as elected officials.[7]

References
  1. "A Forgotten History of Anti-Sikh Violence in the Early-20th-Century Pacific Northwest". Slate. 2015-02-13. ISSN 1091-2339. Retrieved 2017-12-07.
  2. Coulson, Doug (2017). Race, Nation, and Refuge: The Rhetoric of Race in Asian American Citizenship Cases. SUNY Press. ISBN 9781438466613.
  3. Laffan, Michael (2017-10-19). Belonging across the Bay of Bengal: Religious Rites, Colonial Migrations, National Rights. Bloomsbury Publishing. ISBN 9781350022638.
  4. Englesberg, Paul (2013). "Bellingham 'Anti-Hindu Riot' (1907)". Asian Americans: An Encyclopedia of Social, Cultural, Economic, and Political History. ABC-Clio. pp. 141–143. ISBN 9781598842401. Retrieved 22 February 2023.
  5. "A 'Dusky Peril': Trade Unions Resent Indian Labor". Jano. 2017-03-03. Retrieved 2017-12-07.
  6. Gill, Rajan (September 2019). "Revolution and Assimilation: Understanding the Evolving Identity of the Punjabi Sikh Diaspora in California during the Early Twentieth Century". Sikh Research Journal. 4 (1): 1–20.
  7. Venugopal, Arun (August 14, 2018). "Their First Temple Was a Tent. Now Sikhs Walk New Jersey's Halls of Power". New York Times. Retrieved February 22, 2023.
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