Aziz Ansari said in an op-ed that Donald Trump makes him “afraid” for his family.
On Friday, the 33-year-old actor wrote in The New York Times that he and his family are thinking twice before going to worship since the terror attack in Orlando at a gay night club that left 49 people dead. (RELATED: Kerry Washington And Aziz Ansari: ‘Every Industry Is So White’)
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“Being Muslim American already carries a decent amount of baggage,” Ansari said. “In our culture, when people think ‘Muslim,’ the picture in their heads is not usually of the Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzai, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar or the kid who left the boy band One Direction. It’s of a scary terrorist character from ‘Homeland’ or some monster from the news.”
“Today, with the presidential candidate Donald J. Trump and others like him spewing hate speech, prejudice is reaching new levels,” he added. “It’s visceral, and scary, and it affects how people live, work and pray. It makes me afraid for my family. It also makes no sense.”
“The overwhelming number of Muslim Americans have as much in common with that monster in Orlando as any white person has with any of the white terrorists who shoot up movie theaters or schools or abortion clinics,” he continued.
“The vitriolic and hate-filled rhetoric coming from Mr. Trump isn’t so far off from cursing at strangers from a car window,” he said. “He has said that people in the American Muslim community ‘know who the bad ones are’ implying that millions of innocent people are somehow complicit in awful attacks. Not only is this wrongheaded; but it also does nothing to address the real problems posed by terrorist attacks.”