The comedian Aziz Ansari is speaking out against the “visceral and scary” levels of prejudice Donald Trump has promoted over the course of his presidential campaign. In a column for the New York Times, Ansari, the son of Muslim immigrants, outlined how the rise of Trump has made him afraid for his family.
“Being a Muslim American already carries a decent amount of baggage,” Ansari wrote. “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.”
Following the Orlando mass shooting earlier this month, Ansari, fearing for his parents, texted his mother, who, along with his father, appeared in Ansari’s show Master of None, with explicit instructions to not go to the mosque for prayer. “I realized how awful it was to tell an American citizen to be careful about how she worshipped,” Ansari wrote.
The “vitriolic and hate-filled rhetoric” from Trump, who repeated his call for a ban on Muslim immigration to the U.S. following the attacks in Orlando, has not helped matters. Ansari wrote that he and many other Muslim Americans now feel they “must almost prove [themselves] worthy of feeling sad and scared like everyone else.”
Ansari wrote that while he recognizes that his position as a comedian and actor mitigates some of the prejudice other Muslim Americans encounter daily, he remembers how the sting of such bigotry.
“I remember walking home from class near N.Y.U., where I was a student,” he wrote of New York City after the World Trade Center attack on September 11. “I was crossing the street and a man swore at me from his car window and yelled: ‘Terrorist!’ To be fair, I may have been too quick to cross the street as the light changed, but I’m not sure that warranted being compared to the perpetrators of one of the most awful incidents in human history.”
The stranger cursing at him from the car window is comparable to Trump’s comments toward Muslims, Ansari wrote. Over the election year, Trump has implied that those in the American Muslim community are complicit in terrorist attacks, and has also said Muslims cheered in the streets after 9/11 (which authorities maintain did not happen).
“Not only is this wrongheaded; but it also does nothing to address the real problems posed by terrorist attacks,” Ansari wrote. “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.”
