by Anna North
March 24, 2017
Rajpreet Heir was taking the L train to a friend’s birthday party in Manhattan this month when a white man began shouting at her.
“Do you even know what a Marine looks like?” the man asked Ms. Heir, who is pictured in the video above. “Do you know what they have to see? What they do for this country? Because of people like you.”
He told Ms. Heir, who is Sikh and was born in Indiana, that he hoped she was sent “back to Lebanon” and said, “You don’t belong in this country.”
As New York City works to respond to a rise in reports of discrimination and harassment, subways have emerged as a source of special concern.
Harassment has long been a problem on subways, in part because many strangers are packed together on narrow cars, sometimes for long periods. “Even in a park, you’re not going to be quite that close together,” said Emily May, the executive director of the anti-harassment group Hollaback.
But since the election, the group has received nearly double the usual number of reports of harassment on the subway, and more than usual involve racist, Islamophobic or anti-immigrant comments.
Full article:
www.nytimes.com/2017/03/24/opinion/when-your-commute-includes-hearing-you-dont-belong-in-this-country.html?rref=collection%2Ftimestopic%2FHate%20Crimes&action=click&contentCollection=timestopics®ion=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=2&pgtype=collection
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