Sikh-American Community Builds Resilience As Hate Crimes Rise

Within one week in April, three Sikh men between 45 and 72 were assaulted and severely injured in Queens, New York. The Sikh community was also marking the first anniversary of the mass shooting at an Indianapolis FedEx warehouse last year, where four of the eight employees fatally shot belonged to the Sikh community. According to Harvard University's Pluralism Project, there are currently 500,000 Sikh Americans residing in the United States, forming 0.15% of the total U.S. population. Other estimates like the World Religion Database at Boston University calculate there are about 280,000 Sikhs in the U.S., based on the number of Punjabi immigrants from India and Pakistan and an assumption about the proportion of them who are Sikh.