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Friday, March 29
The Indiana Daily Student

opinion

COLUMN: Model minorities targets of recent rise in hate crimes

In general, Asian-Americans and Indian-Americans are perceived as model minorities for American life. And the treatment of these groups by white Americans tends to reflect that.

As an Indian-American, no one has even questioned my citizenship status, nor have they ever suspected me of being guilty of a crime.

But while I usually blend in easily to the fabric of American society, the recent death of Nabra Hassanen reminds us that no matter how American we think we are, there’s something about being Indian and Arab-American that appears to resolutely mean we are not wholly part of the American framework.

Nabra Hassanen was a seventeen-year-old girl making her way to a mosque during Ramadan the morning of June 18th.

She and a group of her friends were going to morning prayer after getting food together before fasting for the day.

On their way back, Darwin Martinez Torres, the man charged with Hassanen’s murder, accosted the group from his vehicle, then got out of the car and assaulted Hassanen with a baseball bat.

She was killed and her body was discarded in a nearby lake, according to the New Yorker.

After reading about this story, I simply became exhausted.

Hassanen is a perfect example of a prototypical American teenager—hanging out with friends, eating at McDonalds, not bothering anyone.

According to Slate, Hassanen was an active member in her community and her friends recall her being a friendly person.

And, yet, she was attacked and murdered for no good reason.

While the police claim it wasn’t a hate crime, I struggle to see how that could be true. I thought the same thing during the Chapel Hill shootings, which were supposedly about a parking spot, according to the New Yorker.

Most importantly, I’m tired of people who make a concerted effort to blend their culture into the American lifestyle being considered the “other” no matter what they do.

Since November, there has been an alarming increase in the number of hate crimes in the United States.

The Southern Poverty Law Center catalogued 1,051 reports of hate crimes between November and December 2016. These included crimes against Muslims, Indian-Americans and Jews, according to Slate.

If you pay attention to the news media, though, it seems that more than a thousand hate crimes aren’t as big of a deal as when a Republican congressmen is attacked.

If he were consistent, you would expect President Trump to have issued a warning against people like Torres—like he did in his Presidential Address to Congress when he announced the creation of an office to investigate crimes committed by immigrants—but he hasn’t.

People like Hassanen are apparently less American and, thus, less worthy of being victims than our congressmen.

There is no easy answer to this problem, but if attacks against certain communities are constantly ignored, then those communities are likely to lose faith in our justice system and in America itself.

I pray that my Muslim friends and their community will be able to celebrate Eid without any troubles. However, I pray more that American society will come to understand that we can showcase our unique cultures without isolating those cultures from the idea of “American-ness.”

The lives of people like Hassanen shouldn’t be the cost of doing so.

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