It was cold. Really cold.

But that didn’t matter. They were there to mourn the murder of one of their own. To offer each other sukoon – relief, comfort after a deep tragedy.

No, he wasn’t from Boston. I don’t know if any of them knew him personally. But it doesn’t matter. Srinivas Khuchibhotla was Indian and alive, and now he’s Indian and dead, because a white man shot him, while yelling, ‘Get out of my country!’

Later, this man admitted he thought Srinivas and his companion (who escaped with his life) were Muslims.

Yesterday, a man in Florida burned down an Indian-owned store – again, because he wanted to ‘run the Arabs out of our country.’

By ‘our’, he didn’t actually mean everyone. He didn’t actually mean all the different people who live here. Who have family here. Who breathe the same air, and share the same sorrows and joys.

No.

He meant white people. Specifically, white Christians.

The fact that the people who perpetrate these hate crimes have been targeting people whose skin contains more melanin than the average white person’s is frightening. It’s nothing new – this country was built on the literal backs and corpses of people of colour, after all, because someone white decided their version of a god made all non-white people ‘lesser’ than whites – but the escalation in violence should at the very least scare the living daylights out of all of us.

This is not normal. This should never be normal. This is evil and vicious and wrong.

Stay loud and resist.

Today, I

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Sukoon