NEW YORK, NY – JANUARY 26: Imam Asad Dandia from the Islamic Center at NYU leads prayers at the “Jummah Prayer: NoBanJFK, 1 Year Later” event in Washington Square Park in New York on Jan. 26, 2018. (Photo by Damon Dahlen/HuffPost)

Last spring, a 39 year-old Sikh man in Kent, Washington was standing in his driveway when a masked man drove up to him, shouted racial slurs (including “go back to your own country!”), and then shot him. Fortunately, he survived. But the story made national and international headlines as yet another example of xenophobic violence sweeping across America.

Most of the analysis about this shooting explained it as a product of Islamophobia fueled by “the Trump effect,” a term coined to describe the recent surge in bias-motivated hate incidents. But there are other dimensions to this story – and hundreds of stories like it – that remain under-covered and under-analyzed.

The mistreatment of Muslims, South Asians, and other brown-skinned people is not simply a product of the Trump presidency. America has a long history of discrimination against Brown Americans and historicizing these incidents helps us understand how they are connected to one another.

For instance, last year’s shooting in Kent, Washington is tied to the 1907 anti-Sikh race riots just 100 miles away in Bellingham, Washington. It is tied to the Chandler Roundup of 1997, in which hundreds of suspected undocumented immigrants – most of whom were Latinx – were detained in Chandler, Arizona, solely on the basis of their brown skin. And it is tied to the 2017 murder of Indian immigrant Srinivas Kuchibothla in Kansas by a man who yelled a similar phrase – “Get out of my country!” – before taking Kuchibothla’s life. And it is also tied to the Muslim woman who was attacked by young girls in Brooklyn this January who punched her while yelling “fucking terrorist!” These incidents range coast to coast and over the course of 100 years, but they are all related.

While these violent incidents took place in different parts of the country and targeted people of different backgrounds, each incident is the result of xenophobic prejudice triggered by Brownness. To many Americans, brown skin is a visible signal – perhaps more so than any other – that marks foreignness, otherness, and, ultimately, deviance. While the various communities described as brown may not identify as such, the imposed identity has become a reality for all those who live in brown skin day in and day out.

In our current context, the challenges that come with being brown are inseparable from anti-Muslim prejudice, a racialized bias that is predicated on bigoted ideas about both Islam and Brownness that have been carried forward, normalized, and institutionalized over time. These ideas require our close examination and interrogation if we are to make this country safe and fair for everyone.

The logics of racism and white supremacy rely on assumptions about what particular racial, ethnic, and religious communities are like, and who the people within them are. And the violence that stems from racism is not limited to momentary personal attacks – it also comes in the form of systemic discrimination and dehumanization enacted by the state.

Looking to the history of criminalization shows us how racial stereotypes based on these longstanding theories of race continue to devastate communities of color. The targeting of Black communities across the US by policies that are focused on, for instance, drugs and immigration have led to staggeringly disproportionate rates of incarceration and what many refer to as “The Lost Generation” of Black Americans.

Anti-Black racism deserves the highest levels of outrage and resistance. We should also expand work on the historical and political construction of Blackness to think about how Brownness has been positioned and constituted as similarly inferior to Whiteness. Just as we need to consider the specific, complicated histories of how both Black and White have been defined and differentiated, we should also attend to the unique history and experiences of those Americans considered to be Brown.

Brown communities have also been criminalized, both historically and presently. White Supremacists and White Nationalists, including President Trump, are advocating for a border wall and a Muslim Ban, actions born out of bias that would further criminalize brown-skinned immigrants.[1] The politics of white supremacy relies heavily on the politics of fear; we are taught to fear the violent crimes that Mexicans, Hondurans, and Arabs ostensibly commit, even though we know empirically that immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than people born in the United States.

This history is long and insidious. Rhetoric around the founding of America denigrated Native Americans as “brownies” and “savages.” After a violent race riot targeting the first South Asians to arrive and work in America, the Puget Sound American published an article with the headline: “Have we a dusky peril? Hindu Hordes Invading the State.” Donald Trump has notoriously described Mexicans as “drug dealers, criminals, and rapists” and has re-tweeted far-right anti-Muslim propaganda videos. And, of course, we are constantly bombarded with messages that Muslims and Arabs are inherently prone to commit indiscriminate terrorist violence despite the fact that, since Trump took office, white American men have killed nearly twice as many people as Muslims have. All of this is directly tied to how we conceptualize the racial category of brownness in modern America.

I was born and raised in San Antonio, Texas, which is more than 60% Latinx. I had very few South Asian, Sikh, or Muslim friends there. Most of my friends identified as Black, White, or Hispanic, and no one I knew – myself included – identified as Brown. But over the past several years, and particularly since 9/11, I have come to realize that I share experiences with other people who look like me, primarily because of how we are perceived by those around us. As a turbaned Sikh American with brown skin and facial hair, these perceptions are typically tied to feelings of anti-Muslim animus. People see me, see me as a potential threat, and treat me accordingly. These interactions – both personal and collective – have helped me develop a deeper sense of kinship with Muslims (and those who look Muslim) than I ever had before. And from that sense of kinship, I’ve become interested in the much broader idea of Brownness, a category that includes Latinx people and Arabs and Native Americans and others who are broadly construed as having brown skin.

Our society is beginning to break down some of the problems of these racial stereotypes. For example, we have become aware that people from the countries targeted by the Muslim Ban and the border wall do not actually pose a significant threat of violence to American citizens. Similarly, many of us recognize now that the term “terrorist” is racially coded and typically only associated with attackers who have brown skin or “Muslim-sounding names.”

We are making progress in understanding the problematic ways in which white supremacy permeates our society and negatively affects us all. Yet, as we keep learning, we have much more work to do. It is with this in mind that NYU’s Center for Religion and Media will host a conversation with leading scholars, journalists, and activists on the topic of “Being Brown: Race, Religion, and Violence in Trump’s America.” Our five panelists – Khaled Beydoun, Laurie Goodstein, Amardeep Singh, Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst, and Jaweed Kaleem – are academics, journalists, and advocates who have worked at the intersection of religion and race in various ways and have an immense amount of knowledge and insights to contribute. On the evening of March 8, we will gather to think about brownness as a racial category and to reflect on what it is like to be brown in America, both historically and in our current moment. We invite you to join us for this timely and urgent conversation.

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[1] Our focus here on how issues like white supremacy and immigration affect Brown Americans is not intended to diminish the impact on other communities of color (e.g., the revocation of Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Haitians).

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Simran Jeet Singh is a professor of religion at Trinity University and Senior Religion Fellow for the Sikh Coalition, a civil rights organization based in New York City. This year, Simran serves as the Henry R. Luce Fellow for Religion and International Affairs at NYU’s Center for Religion and Media. He frequently contributes opinion pieces to various news outlets, and he has become a consistent expert for reporters around the world in television, radio, and print media. Simran is also on the board for Religion Newswriters Association, the premier organization for religion journalists in America,