Category: Civil Rights

Yesterday evening, President Trump addressed the 115th Congress on the State of the Union. Some, including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and others, have described the address as a departure from President Trump’s polarizing, tumultuous, and chaotic first year in office. Notwithstanding, as Greg Sargent writing for The Washington Post noted, “The real core of the speech was his effort to rhetorically recast the key elements of that approach as unifying and conciliatory, without moving past them at all.” Thus, while President Trump’s State of the Union address did not feature the sort of flagrant Islamophobic remarks he has made in the past, his rhetoric, past and present, has emboldened many who share his distorted worldview.

I was born in Memphis, and reared in the Atlanta area. Thus, I was born in the city where Rev. Dr. Martin Luther, King, Jr. was assassinated, and came of age in the city that made Dr. King the man he was. For most of my life, I found myself fascinated by the man who would become an icon for justice. As a child, I often watched his speeches in awe, as a teenager, I dutifully read biographies of him, as a college student, I walked the same halls he once did as I pursued my undergraduate education at Dr. King’s beloved alma mater—Morehouse College. His legacy is part of the reason I became a Civil Rights Attorney. Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. is one of my foremost influences, particularly as it relates to my desire to pursue the cause of justice.

White supremacists and neo-Nazis have lauded President Trump as a champion of their causes, and have regularly celebrated his vile stances. Indeed, President Trump has made his worldview clear both as a private citizen, and as the occupant of the nation’s highest office. He did so again earlier this week with a series of inflammatory tweets meant to disparage Islam.

On Tuesday, President Trump retweeted three tweets from the Twitter account of Jayda Fransen, Deputy Leader Britain First, a racist, neo-facsist organization whose leaders have been prosecuted for hate crimes and incitement to violence. In short, the President of the United States, the man who holds the most powerful individual position in the world’s most powerful nation, has unapologetically endorsed the bigoted, Islamophobic views of a fringe, extremist organization by sharing these inflammatory videos.

On Friday October 20, 2017, I spoke on a panel as part of the third annual Advance Initiative Conference. The conference, hosted at Stone Hill Church in Princeton, NJ, is a national gathering of church leaders, primarily of Indian descent, who seek to provide a more profound understanding of biblical application for churches that service immigrant and second-generation American communities. My panel focused on the role church leaders who preside over congregations who are primarily Indian American can play regarding the important dialog of faith-based initiatives toward racial reconciliation and justice.

The United States Justice Department recently announced it came to an agreement with Bensalem Township to resolve a dispute stemming from the township’s denial of zoning approval which would have permitted Bensalem Masjid to build a mosque on three adjoining parcels of land in the township.