Minhaj Hasan offered dramatic new evidence of hate speech in the United States during a panel discussion of hate speech and ethnic media organized by New America Media at the 2016 Investigative Reporters and Editors Conference held June 16-19 in New Orleans, Louisiana.
Hasan is editor in chief of The Muslim Link, a monthly publication based in Washington, D.C. He took his wife to dinner on Thursday, June 16, the evening before the panel, after sunset, since the conference fell during Ramadan. His wife – who covers her body, but does not veil her face – drew the unwelcome attention of a white woman sitting on the sidewalk in New Orleans’ alcohol-soaked French Quarter.
“Her facial expression changed,” Hasan said of the white woman. “Then she started to mumble, ‘No, you don’t.’ Then, she flipped. She started swearing. I thought she was going to attack, but thankfully, she didn’t.”
Hasan – who said his family had never experienced anything like this before – made a general point based on their personal experience.
“There is a different environment for Muslims in this country,” Hasan said. “There is a different environment, and it is getting worse.”
Sandy Close, executive editor and director of New America Media, organized the panel in the context of the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign – and, more specifically, the rise of Donald Trump to secure the Republican nomination. Trump has singled out Muslims and Mexicans in direct attacks, calling for a ban on Muslim immigration into the United States and mass deportation of undocumented immigrants. Trump has described Mexican immigrants as “rapists” and said as president he would build a wall along the Mexican-U.S. border.
A Latino perspective was offered by Juan Esparza Loera, editor of Vida en el Valle, a weekly Latino newspaper based in Fresno, California. He described the growing electoral power of Latin Americans in California, where there is now a Latino plurality and 13.1 million Latinos will cast a vote in 2016.
Yet the state’s agricultural industry, in particular, is driven by the labor of undocumented immigrants from south of the border, and they are politically powerless. Loera said the “hatred” toward Mexican immigrants expressed by Trump and his supporters – and the threat of mass deportations, in the event of Trump’s election – has left many in this community “shaken with fear.”
Joe Wei, managing editor of The World Journal, a 350,000-circulation daily Chinese-language newspaper based in New York, described the struggle of “filtering out all of the hate speech” in this election cycle to “inform and educate and his readers.”
He also described Chinese Americans as an immigrant group – unlike Hispanics and African Americans, who poll as massively opposed to Trump – that has more mixed feelings about the Republican nominee. Wei said that older, more settled Chinese Americans tend to support Democrats, but about one-third of Chinese Americans – especially newer, younger entrepreneurial immigrants – support Trump and Republicans generally.
“Chinese don’t like abortion,” Wei explained. “Chinese don’t like homosexuality. Chinese favor going tough on crime. And Chinese want less taxes.”
Jenise Morgan, senior editor of Florida Courier, a black weekly based in Tampa, Florida, described two Americas that she had witnessed in her reporting this year.
One America is the America of Trump rallies, the other is the America of victim vigils. She covered a Trump rally in Tampa where she saw about 20 African Americans in a crowd of some 4,000, and half of those were working media. The atmosphere of fear and hatred at that rally was contrasted by the unity and love she felt at a vigil held in Tampa for the victims of the Club Pulse massacre 85 miles away in Orlando, Florida.
By the sheer force of demographics, Morgan suggested, Trump and his supporters will not prevail. “Minorities will soon be the new majority in this country,” she said.
Loera made a similar point, based on the electoral power of Latinos and other minorities. He described the “Pete Wilson effect,” also known as the “Prop 187 effect,” named after the anti-immigrant ballot proposition in California and the governor who pushed it.
“They passed the proposition,” Loera said, “but in the end it was bad for the Republican Party.”
