The killing of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Fla., has brought the abundant racial problems within the U.S. into the spotlight. His death was followed this weekend by the brutal killing of an Iraqi mother of five, Shaima Alawadi, in El Cajon, Calif., who was beaten to death with a tire iron and found by her daughter with a note next to her body that said, “Go back to your country, terrorist.”

These events have caught national attention, especially because they dramatically illustrate the breakdown between America’s surface understanding of racism and the ugly truth of what lies beneath.

Alawadi’s murder hit home because the exact words on the note written next to her beaten body have been said directly to me before. I was 14, and the kid who said it to me was just that, a kid. But I was left only with anguish and hot tears. He wasn’t the first to call me a terrorist, and by then I had developed a tougher skin.

But Alawadi had found a similar threatening note on her front door a month before her murder. She, too, had likely toughened herself to the slew of Islamophobic racism that is tolerated to a ridiculous extent in this country.

In Florida, the killing of the innocent teen Trayvon Martin by a neighborhood watch captain amounted to a similar and more deep-rooted racism. Journalist Geraldo Rivera commented last week that Martin’s suspicious attire could be a factor in his death, essentially stating that hoodies are reason enough to suspect someone as a criminal.

Rivera’s incendiary comments, which he hasn’t had the tact or decency to revoke, distill the racist imagery behind many Americans’ understanding of what a criminal looks like: black, and apparently, wearing a hoodie.

These tragic murders can be brushed aside as the crazed acts of few, and it’s true that a very small minority would actually go so far as to kill based on their racist motives. But the recent events at a fraternity on our own campus only prove that racism runs deep even in our own backyard.

The incident at Delta Upsilon involving two black women who were harassed as they cut through DU’s lawn is less a reflection on the Greek system and more an indicator of the race problems in our generation at large.

I sometimes find myself excusing older generations for their racism, maybe because I seldom enjoy picking fights with grandfathers, but in this day and age, I find it hard to find excuses for our generation. Madison is very much a racially-divided city, and it’s often clear that whites who grew up primarily in middle- and upper-middle class suburbs are uncomfortable around blacks. 

The issue behind the discomfort is really what’s at play. Of course, the actions of Martin and Alawadi’s killers are deplorable, but crazed individuals commit these acts with the backing of racist hyperbole. Newt Gingrich’s recent comments accusing the “liberal elite” media of covering up Obama’s links to Muslims along with countless Islamophobic comments from the right are as much to blame for Alawadi’s murder as the murderer himself. The stereotype of an African-American boy in a hoodie as a thug is so deeply engrained in our culture that it’s hard to even point fingers at a single person like Rivera.

Finding the root of the deep-set racism behind these acts is a science in itself, but the incidents are easy to link to the wave of racist popular media we consume. I remember the season of “24” where the unassuming suburban Muslim family ended up harboring a terrorist, a not-so-subtle “wink-wink nudge-nudge” from our friends at FOX that families like my own should be viewed suspiciously.

Islamophobia has gripped this country truly after Sept. 11, but racism toward blacks is about as American as apple pie. The ugly comments on The Badger Herald article about the incident at DU are proof of how ubiquitous racism on our campus is. Maybe the fraternity brothers who yelled those slurs can be seen the product of a racially-charged media, the same way Martin’s killer can claim the teen’s hoodie was reason enough to shoot and Alawadi’s headscarf was proof of her being a terrorist. But I don’t think our generation can get away with excuses anymore.

Meher Ahmad ([email protected]) is a junior majoring in International Studies and Middle East Studies.