It was in the aftermath of the Orlando gayclub shooting that actor Aziz Ansari called up his Muslim parents, and asked them to do all their prayers at home.
He begged his mother not to “go anywhere near a mosque.” His fear was palpable on the phone.
Writing for the New York Times, the American actor of Netflix’s Master of None fame, immediately realised “how awful it was to tell an American citizen to be careful about how she worshiped.”
Lamenting on the narrative of accusing every brown man as being a terrorist, Ansari writes on how being a Muslim American already carries a “decent amount of baggage.”
In our culture, when people think ‘Muslim,’ the picture in their heads is not usually of the Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzai, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar or the kid who left the boy band One Direction. It’s of a scary terrorist character from Homeland or some monster from the news.
He then moves to the point – Donald Trump’s vitriolic election campaign.
With Trump “spewing hate speech, prejudice is reaching new levels. It’s visceral, and scary, and it affects how people live, work and pray. It makes me afraid for my family. It also makes no sense,” he writes.
Ansari recalls an incident post 9/11, when a driver yelled “terrorist” at him as he was walking home from class.
He compares the driver’s hate-filled rhetoric with that of Trump, which aren’t too unrelated according to him.
He has said that people in the American Muslim community “know who the bad ones are,” implying that millions of innocent people are somehow complicit in awful attacks. Not only is this wrongheaded; but it also does nothing to address the real problems posed by terrorist attacks. By Mr Trump’s logic, after the huge financial crisis of 2007-08, the best way to protect the American economy would have been to ban white males.
According to reports, there have been 49 mass shootings since 9/11, more than half of which were perpetrated by white men.
I doubt we’ll hear Mr Trump make a speech asking his fellow white males to tell authorities “who the bad ones are,” or call for restricting white males’ freedom.
He goes on to argue how xenophobia was key to Trump’s speeches even before the Orlando attacks happened.
This is a guy who kicked off his presidential run by calling Mexicans “rapists” who were “bringing drugs” to this country. Numerous times, he has said that Muslims in New Jersey were cheering in the streets on 11 September, 2001.
Countering Trump’s hate agenda against Muslims, Ansari says that after 9/11, “there was absolutely no cheering, only sadness, horror and fear.”
And then with an obvious hint of sarcasm, Ansari writes that after the Orlando shootings, it was Trump who tweeted with cheer, having predicted the attack .
“It appears that day he was the one who was celebrating after an attack,” Ansari notes.
(At The Quint, we question everything. Play an active role in shaping our journalism by becoming a member today.)