Student killings a rallying cry for alienated Muslim Americans

A Muslim American Ferguson moment?

Among the millions of posts about the killing, there quickly appeared clear themes. Many users wondered how much more news coverage the killings would have received had it been a Muslim man who’d shot three white students dead. Others asked white Americans to vocally condemn the alleged killer, and make an effort to find out how he became radicalized – a sardonic reversal of something many Muslims complain they are continually asked to do. Many, including some of the victims’ family members, rejected the claim that the killing was prompted solely by a dispute over a parking space, calling it an obvious hate crime.

(It is a testament to the perceived consequences of the phrase “hate crime” that the alleged killer’s wife held a press conference to assure the public that the murders of which her husband is accused were in fact not motivated by hatred for the victims’ religion. In a bit of a non sequitur, she backed this claim by mentioning that many of Mr. Hicks’s posts on Facebook were in support of such causes as abortion and gay rights. She did not mention his many anti-religion posts, but their content suggests one torturous defence may ultimately be that the killings he is alleged to have committed were not hate crimes against his Muslim victims because he hates all religious equally).

In many ways, the volume and tenor of the Muslim American community’s reaction to the killing is similar to the outcry that sparked the “Black Lives Matter” movement. Multifaceted, it is nonetheless a response anchored in the belief that injustices, when perpetrated against victims of a particular minority, are simply considered less serious. But whereas the Black Lives Matter movement drew on hundreds of years of examples, the Muslim-American response is focused almost solely on the events of the past 14 years.

Broadly, the grievances of many Muslim Americans exist in one of two categories – the grand geopolitical outrages over two full-scale wars and their myriad repercussions, and the more immediate, day-to-day frustrations to which belong such issues as the Duke prayer controversy, the uproar over the so-called Ground Zero Mosque in New York City and the spike in accusatory harassment that tends to follow every barbarity committed by terror groups half a world away.

The two categories are related, but for most Muslim Americans, the former is relatively abstract – the chances of any American being shipped off to the Guantanamo Bay detention camps today is essentially nil. But the latter complaints – harassment, accusation, a sense of otherness – are not. And, once extrapolated, such concerns reach their sad apex in the prospect of a hateful neighbour at the front door, gun in hand. Like the killing of Mr. Brown in Ferguson last summer, the murder of the three Chapel Hill students is a single rock that, dislodged, triggers a landslide.

Student killings a rallying cry for alienated Muslim Americans – The Globe and Mail.