Ridin' Derpy

[footnotefetish]

I'm getting tired of the Sikhs-get-mistaken-for-Muslims trope, which is what we've been hearing frequently since last weekend's shooting at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin. It's what we often heard after the many other attacks against Sikhs that have occurred in the last dozen or so years. In exactly how many cases do we know for sure that the victims

Comments

[azureowl]

Hear, hear!

[alsoname]

Interesting. It has bothered me that the trope has been perpetuated without pointing out the obvious, "Oh BTW it's fucked up to target Muslims as well!" But I hadn't even thought of that second point, that it lends a tiny bit of legitimacy to white supremacists' motives.

[footnotefetish]

Yes, your point is also a good one--and another one of the reasons it irritates the hell out of me that the media keep repeating this line.

Imagine if white supremacists were targeting Amish people, and we got some inkling, some circumstantial evidence, that these Amish victims were being mistaken for Jews. If the media jumped on the Amish-get-mistaken-for-Jews trope the way they have with the Sikh-Muslim trope (equally lacking in qualifiers and so forth), people would be calling it anti-Semitic. And their accusations would be accurate.