In the wake of the terrorist onslaught of 9/11, there might have been more of an ethnic backlash than in fact occurred. Among the many historical parallels that came to people's minds, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was one. Yet the aftermath of that event, the “relocation” of all people of Japanese origin from the Pacific Coast states to internment camps, was never suggested as a model for the treatment of Arab or Muslim minorities in the United States after 9/11. Indeed, there were a few nasty incidents, but if anything, the official response, from the White House on down, aimed at containing such retaliatory impulses. President Bush had the right instincts in his September 11 address to the nation when he said: “This is a day when all Americans from every walk of life unite in our resolve for justice and peace. America has stood down enemies before, and we will do so this time. None of us will ever forget this day. Yet, we go forward to defend freedom and all that is good and just in our world.”

Although we may differ in our views on how the president later pursued this course, his call at the time chimed well with the nation's needs for rituals of collective mourning and displays of patriotism. Indeed, “Americans from every walk of life,” in all their ethnic diversity, united in their expressions of grief and common nationhood. The Stars and Stripes were once again the emblem of such national unity, truly representing Americans of all stripes. Only later would ethnicity become a dimension of the government response to the threat of terrorism. Attorney General John Ashcroft, who oversaw the entire domestic response to the attacks of September 11, among many other projects launched the Special Registration program. In the words of Georgetown Law Professor David Cole, this amounted to a national campaign of ethnic profiling that required all male immigrants from Arab and Muslim countries (some 80,000 men) to report to immigration authorities and be fingerprinted, photographed, and interviewed, regardless of whether there was any other basis for suspicion than ethnicity.