Since Master of None hit it big last year, Aziz Ansari has been using his celebrity as a platform to speak out against racism in Hollywood. He always does so with a little humor and sharp commentary, and he’s a master of entertaining while also highlighting injustices that he hopes will one day cease to exist.
Now, Ansari has written an op-ed for the New York Times about the Orlando nightclub shooting, and the fallout for Muslim Americans created by Donald Trump’s rhetoric against Muslims throughout his presidential campaign. In this op-ed, Ansari focuses on how Trump implicated the entire Muslim community, saying they all “know who the bad ones are.”
This has resulted in suspicion for one of Ansari’s Muslim American friends:
I asked a young friend of mine, a woman in her 20s of Muslim heritage, how she had been feeling after the attack. “I just feel really bad, like people think I have more in common with that idiot psychopath than I do the innocent people being killed,” she said. “I’m really sick of having to explain that I’m not a terrorist every time the shooter is brown.”
Ansari also recounts how he warned his mother not to pray at the mosque, lest they become targets of anti-Muslim violence, and that’s why Trump upsets him so much. Trump also reminds him about how after September 11, when Ansari was an NYU student who had to evacuate during the attack, someone yelled “terrorist” at him. He points out that even if every suspected terrorist that the FBI is investigating was Muslim American, that would implicate the vast majority of the local Muslim community who have no association with wrongdoing, and that it’s unfair to be treated like they automatically do.
He also points out Trump congratulating himself after the Orlando shooting while making a point about a politician using a tragedy for political gain. Why doesn’t that get more criticism?
(via New York Times)