Harmann Singh was shopping in a store in Cambridge.
A 22-year-old Sikh student at Harvard Law School was allegedly abused and harassed at a store near the campus after he was mistaken for being a Muslim.
Harmann Singh, a fist year law student at the university, said that he was shopping in a store in Cambridge, Massachusetts while speaking on the phone with his mother, when a man walked in and said to the clerk behind the counter, “Oh look, there’s a f***ing Muslim.”
“Over the weekend, I was confronted by a man who called me a ‘f***ing Muslim’ and followed me around a store aggressively asking where I was from, and no one in the store said a thing. I was on the phone with my mom the entire time, and we were both concerned for my safety as this man stood inches away from me,” Singh described his experience in The Boston Globe.
Singh, who is from Buffalo, New York, said he tried to ignore the man and continued to talk to his worried mother. The man chased Singh to the checkout counter, harassed him and forced him to leave the store.
“Such hate and intolerance is not new, and the fight against them transcends political and personal identities; this can occur anywhere and to anyone; bystander intervention is a concrete and crucial step everyone can take,” Singh writes.
The owner of the store recalled the incident occurred on November and told to Boston.com that he was going back and forth inside the shop and saw the man speaking to Singh.
Across the US, incidents of hate, harassment and intimidation have been increased dramatically ever since Donald Trump’s victory in the presidential elections on November 8.