Indians aren’t a “model minority” in Trump’s US. Just a minority.

Police in California are investigating the murder of a 32-year old Sikh man on May 5, Jagjeet Singh – after he refused to sell cigarettes to a man who did not have proper ID – as a possible hate crime.

On May 4, Ramesh Kumar’s body was found in his car in Michigan. He had been shot to death. His family insisted that it was not a hate crime. The police have not ruled out the possibility.

This was days after the internet’s latest woke bae, Daily Show correspondent Hasan Minhaj, roasted Donald Trump at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on April 30. Minhaj is a brown-skinned Muslim of Indian descent, a fact he declares almost 30 seconds into the bit.

On the morning of April 16, Sikh taxi driver, Harkirat Singh was assaulted by four passengers hurling racial abuses, who tore off his turban in Manhattan. This was hours after thousands of Sikhs had gathered to celebrate “Turban Day” at Times Square. The New York Police Department are investigating the incident as a possible hate crime, the Indian Express tells us. Singh said he tried to plead with his attackers, “Brother, why are you doing this?” Not that the assaulters hesitated in attacking him.

On March 11, Shree Chauhan accosted then-White House press secretary Sean Spicer at an Apple store in Washington. “How does it feel to work for a fascist?”, she asked glibly. He simply replied, “It’s such a great country that allows you to be here.” Chauhan is Indian-American. In a blog post, Chauhan wrote that she was “stunned” and that Spicer’s comment was indicative of “racism and it is an implied threat”. Surprising no one, the founder and chairman of the Republican Hindu Coalition, Shalabh Kumar, told PTI, “Send her to Pakistan and then she would realise how great is our country”.

The surprise expressed by both Chauhan and Singh is not at racism existing in the US, but that they were at the receiving end of it. The core of the “victimhood” narrative is in transcending the trappings of one’s own ethnicity, and the illusion of mainstream acceptance.

Jason Kendall was charged with second-degree assault, unlawful use of a weapon and second-degree intimidation after being arrested at Al Aqsa Fine Middle Eastern Cuisine in Salem, Washington. Kendall told arresting officers on March 7 that he attacked an employee with a metal pipe while screaming “get out of America” and “Arab, you need to leave”. Authorities are trying to determine if Kendall should be charged with a hate crime.

On March 10, police in Florida arrested Richard Leslie Lloyd who was attempting to burn down a convenience store that he assumed was owned by Muslims. He told the police that he wanted to, “run the Arabs out of our country”. Sheriff Ken Mascara, described the incident as “unfortunate” and stated that Lloyd “made the assumption that the store owners were Arabic, when in fact, they are of Indian descent”. It is unclear who this was “unfortunate” for — the Indians who almost lost their livelihood, or the “Arabs” who did not? The authorities are debating charging Lloyd with a hate crime.

It took federal authorities weeks to decide that the shooting of Srinivas Kuchibhotla and Alok Madasani in Kansas on February 23 would be investigated as a hate crime. Kuchibhotla was killed in the attack, Madasani and another bar patron, Ian Grillot were injured by the shooter Adam Purinton. Purinton was arrested after he reportedly told a bartender at a bar in an Applebee’s in Clinton, Missouri that he needed a place to hide out because he had just killed two “Middle Eastern men”. Several witnesses also reported that Purinton, a Navy veteran, had used several racial slurs and had yelled “get out of my country” before opening fire. Madasani told The New York Times “[Purinton] asked us what visa are we currently on and whether we are staying here illegally”.

A few days later, on March 2, Harnish Patel, the owner of a convenience store in Lancaster County, South Carolina, was found dead of gunshot wounds in the front yard of his home. The police have not ascertained a motive at this time. Sheriff Barry Faile said that Patel’s ethnicity does not appear to be a factor in the crime. An Indian Express story quotes an unnamed member of the police department who claims otherwise. No American newspaper covered this killing other than Annie Gowen, Washington Post’s India bureau chief. The crux of the story was how Indians were now wary of travelling to the United States.

A day later, a man walked up the driveway of Deep Rai’s home in Kent, Washington and argued with him before shooting him. There’s some confusion among the witnesses as to what the shooter yelled before opening fire. Some say it was, “Get out of our country”, others claim it was “Go back to your own country!” The US Department Of Justice to open a civil rights investigation to determine if this was also a hate crime. No decision has currently been reached.

Purinton, Lloyd, Kendall – none of them knew the people they attacked; they didn’t even know where they were from. These were not robberies or disputes. These men acted with impunity because they felt their very identity as Americans was diluted. To deny these attacks as acts of xenophobia and racism is to unequivocally state that America does not have a problem of systemic racism.

The attack on Kuchibhotla and Madasani made news, disrupting the myth of the model minority — that despite economic contributions and stark professionalism, all minorities (regardless of internal distinctions) are uniformly suspicious. Arun Venugopal, in an unfortunately appropriative phrase, called Kuchibhotla’s murder South East Asia’s “Vincent Chin moment”. The NPR story is a rare instance of admission – the model minority myth has always been just that.

Bay Area activist Anirvan Chatterjee, told Venugopal that the shootings in Kansas served as “a huge wake-up call” for Hindu Americans. “They thought they were safe”, he said. We never were. “They thought their bindis would protect them, they thought their last names would protect them, they thought their advanced degrees would protect them, and something changed.”

The myth of the model minority is rooted in exceptionalism. Minhaj’s speech has been described as many things– a “wake-up call for journalism”, “excoriating” and “brave”. And it indubitably is. It’s bravery, however, is not so much in its opposition to Trump (I’m tempted to argue that to exist in America while brown is an opposition to Trump and the politics that placed him) but in a steadfast admission in identity, one that is not an outlier to the country’s policies – but felt on a personal, singular level. Minhaj revels in his brown-ness, his Muslim-ness and his American-ness and not just to the Trump administration, but to a media who have normalised identity politics (as the Gray Lady frequently reminds us, sales have never been better). The smatter of uncomfortable applause spoke volumes.

“Indians – we are the white people of brown people”, Indian comedian Vir Das joked on an episode of Conan. Unraveling Minhaj’s statement, the joke hinges on the illusion of the model minority as different from “other” minorities, and hierarchically closer to power. It’s why you won’t see us protesting the Dakota Access Pipeline, or marching in Black Lives Matter Protests — the fear of being lumped with what are perceived as “disposable lives”. Inversely, comedian Zahra Noorbaksh recalls turning down a gig that was pitched to her as, “Wow, she’s Muslim, but she’s funny! And she’s just like us!” She narrates her experience doing “good Muslim” comedy post-September 11 – “I hadn’t made them more empathetic to Muslims as a whole.” (For instance, visiting the community, Kansas Governor Sam Brownback described Indians as a “valuable community” – highlighting their value as a commodity, and not a people discovering the illusion of safety was just that.)

The tactics of assimilation, of keeping one’s head down and claiming, “we aren’t like those minorities; we’re the good ones” peppered with a healthy dose of Islamophobia just isn’t enough. Making our names more palatable, paying obeisance to the ruling dispensation, earning twice the national average or downplaying our cultural differences won’t save us.

Hate crimes are those that are motivated by “bias or prejudice against a person or people perceived to be a part of a group, and that is intended to induce fear, scare, terrify or cause psychological harm.” The FBI defines them as “criminal offense against a person or property motivated in whole or in part by an offender’s bias against a race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, ethnicity, gender, or gender identity”. Other than occasionally carrying a harsher sentence, hate crimes are an acknowledgment of a systemic problem. Denying this, posits these crimes as outliers and not a consistent problem in an environment that is hostile (The Southern Poverty Law Center has documented about 900 hate crimes and other acts of intolerance since November). “2016 was an unprecedented year for hate”, said Mark Potok, senior fellow and editor of the Intelligence Report. “The country saw a resurgence of white nationalism that imperils the racial progress we’ve made, along with the rise of a president whose policies reflect the values of white nationalists,” he said.

That the Indian government’s response has been muted is unsurprising. We’re still panicking about the curbs on H-1B visas and what this means for our IT industry (Indian firms receive 60 per cent of all H-1Bs and account for a $150 billion-dollar industry). Even the Sangh wants to downplay this. We want to make sure we’re on the “right” side of that cockamamie wall.

Telling and unsurprising in equal parts was President Donald Trump’s response to the attacks – silence. Anand Giridharadas noted in The Atlantic that Trump has condemned several episodes of “Saturday Night Live,” (at a rate only marginally slower than his condemnation of news organisations), an actor, a local union leader in Indiana, military contractors and a terrible thing that never happened in Sweden. But Trump has neither expressly condemned these crimes, nor the climate in which their frequency occurs.

Racism isn’t particularly new, nor is it the sole purvey of America. It is, however, vital to register their rise and the coverage they receive – Kuchibhotla’s death dominated the news. Every subsequent act, disproving the accusations of outliers or being unrelated are buried further into the papers.

Singh and Kumar’s murders found very little space in the media, even ours. Harikat’s assault, at best, warranted a tweet from New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio. No major papers gave it much attention other than a cursory report. No impassioned speeches, no trending hashtags – no clearer sign that this is the new normal.

Hate does not spring forth, fully formed from a vacuum. There is a video on Youtube of a quiet Ohio suburb. It is called “Ohio Suburban Park is Occupied by Indians with Various Green $$$ (H1-B L-1 H-4 ) Visas” and is shot from a hidden vantage point. It features children, all brown, playing volleyball or on swings or with their families. The description for this otherwise idyllic scene is “Occupy and Displace. What Happened to the People Who Used to Live There and Used the Park? They lost their jobs to people from foreign countries. How and Why?” The video links to a website called SAVEAMERICANITJOBS.

This video, uploaded in August, has been viewed 43,000 times. According to Youtube, the video violates none of their rules.

What is alarming isn’t that there are people who hold these views and cannot distinguish one ethnic group from another, or even that they hold these views publicly and with little consequence. Despite the prevailing mythos telling us otherwise, valuing lives other than ours does not devalue our own. Our place is and always has been with the lower frequencies – the people the Trump administration will never hold dear.