A 22-year-old Sikh Harvard Law School student from Buffalo, New York, was last week allegedly abused and harassed at a store near the campus by a man who mistook him for a Muslim. Harmann Singh, a first year law student at the university, said he was shopping in a store in Cambridge, Massachusetts, while speaking on the phone with his mother.
“Over the weekend, I was confronted by a man who called me a ‘f—-ing Muslim’ and followed me around a store aggressively asking where I was from, and no one in the store said a thing,” Singh wrote on his Facebook page. “While this pales in comparison to discrimination faced by others, and while I’m not particularly rattled/disheartened, bystander intervention is crucial,” his post said. “ Whenever we see racism, sexism, islamophobia, or xenophobia, we need to take a stand—all of us. “I’m going to keep walking with my head held high and with love in my heart—no one will change that. But hopefully we can stand together against intolerance and injustice.”
Writing about his experiences in the Boston Globe, Singh said that since the election last week, many Americans have felt unsafe and incidents of hate have increased dramatically. “However, people of color, immigrants, religious minorities, and other groups have in ways felt marginalized for hundreds of years,” he wrote. Instances of harassment are not new, and their increased frequency makes understanding and responding crucial and timely. Whether this happened last year or on the night of the election, whether the man was white or brown, whether I was actually a Muslim or not – these are irrelevant. Such hate is intolerable whenever, wherever, and against whomever it occurs.”
According to Singh, the man started following him around the store, harassing him and asking him where he was from. When Singh told him he was from New York and that he lives down the street, the man did not respond and Singh left the store as quickly as possible.
The owner of the store told Boston.com that he was going back and forth between the back and front of the shop at the time of the incident that took place on Nov. 11 and saw the man who spoke to Singh come in. He said he had planned to ask the man to leave, but went to the back of the store when the incident occurred. Both Singh and the other man were gone when he returned. He said he was shocked and sorry when his clerk told him what happened.
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