OPINION: The San Diego Mosque Shooting Makes White Supremacy Hard to Ignore

Every time Muslims are murdered in this country, America performs the same hollow ritual.

Politicians offer condolences. News anchors suddenly discover Islamophobia exists. People post statements about unity and tolerance. Then the news cycle moves on while the conditions that created the violence remain completely intact.

As a Black Muslim woman living and organizing in the South, born to two Somali immigrants, I am tired of being expected to survive inside a system that keeps manufacturing our dehumanization, then acting shocked when it turns deadly.

The recent shooting at the Islamic Center of San Diego, where three Muslim men were killed protecting worshippers during prayer, was not random. It was not an unfortunate exception to American life. It was America functioning exactly as it was designed to function — protecting power through fear, militarism, racial scapegoating and the constant creation of internal enemies.

Because this country did not accidentally become Islamophobic; it was taught.

For decades, the United States has built an entire political culture around teaching people to fear Muslims. After 9/11, Muslims became the perfect target for an expanding security state hungry for justification. 

Surveillance powers expanded. Muslim communities were infiltrated. Mosques were monitored. Children grew up watching their faith associated with terrorism before they were even old enough to understand geopolitics. Entire wars were justified through narratives portraying Muslim lives as disposable.

Americans were told this was about safety, but you cannot spend decades normalizing the idea that Muslims are dangerous then feign surprise when somebody kills Muslims in a mosque. That violence is not disconnected from policy. It is the domestic consequence of it.

We have seen this before in our own state.

In 2015, three Muslim students — Deah Barakat, Yusor Abu-Salha, and Razan Abu-Salha — were executed by their neighbor in Chapel Hill. Muslim communities across the country immediately recognized the atmosphere surrounding those killings because we had already spent years living inside America’s post-9/11 culture of suspicion and dehumanization. 

But even then, there were attempts to depoliticize what happened, to frame the murders as solely the result of a parking spot dispute, disconnected from the broader climate of Islamophobia shaping this country.

That is what America repeatedly does with anti-Muslim violence: isolate the incident, individualize the perpetrator, mourn temporarily, and refuse to confront the systems that made the violence imaginable in the first place.

The North Carolina Muslim community has not forgotten Chapel Hill because we understood what those murders represented long before much of the country was willing to confront Islamophobia honestly. 

We understood that anti-Muslim violence in America does not emerge from nowhere. It grows from years of political rhetoric, state surveillance, war propaganda, border militarization, and media narratives teaching the public who deserves fear and who deserves empathy.

San Diego is not separate from Chapel Hill. It is part of the same political story.

As Muslims — especially Black Muslims and immigrant Muslims — we are expected to navigate this country carrying impossible contradictions. We are told to assimilate while constantly being reminded we do not belong. We are told America stands for freedom while watching our communities get surveilled, detained, profiled and criminalized. 

We are told diversity is celebrated while politicians openly campaign on anti-immigrant fearmongering and mass deportation fantasies. And for Somali communities specifically, the hypocrisy is impossible to ignore.

America destabilizes countries through war, intervention, extraction and militarism then criminalizes the very refugees displaced by those same systems. Somali immigrants come to this country seeking survival and are met with suspicion, surveillance and hostility. 

Muslim immigrants are expected to constantly prove our innocence while white nationalist violence continues to be treated as an individual problem instead of what it actually is: a political project rooted in white supremacy. 

Because white supremacy in America has always required enemies, and if we understand that, then silence is not an option anymore.

Calling out Islamophobia cannot be selective. It cannot only happen after violence erupts. It cannot be reduced to sympathy posts or temporary outrage when the cameras are on us. It has to become something consistent, something practiced in how we speak, how we organize, how we show up for one another when no one is watching.

Because what protects Muslims does not stop at Muslims. What protects Black Muslims does not stop at Black Muslims. What protects immigrant communities does not stop at immigrants. This is shared ground, whether people choose to see it or not.

I call on my neighbors to speak when Muslims are dehumanized in political speeches. Speak when surveillance is expanded in the name of “security.” Speak when mosques are treated as threats instead of places of worship. Speak when grieving communities are asked to justify their own humanity.

You do not have to be a community organizer to shift the narrative. Do not wait for another tragedy to make it acceptable to care.

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More than speaking, I ask that you act. Stand with Muslim communities not as an abstract idea, but in real solidarity — in schools, in workplaces, in organizing spaces, in your neighborhoods. Challenge the casual Islamophobia that gets excused as ignorance. Interrupt the narratives that make violence feel inevitable. Refuse the language that turns entire communities into suspects.

Because every time Islamophobia is ignored, it becomes easier to repeat. And every time it is repeated, it moves closer to someone else’s door. The choice in front of us is not whether this violence exists. It already does. The choice is whether we keep treating it as background noise or whether we decide to name it, confront it and refuse to let it define what safety means in this country.

Stand with Muslim communities. Speak when it is uncomfortable. Speak when it costs something. Speak even when the news cycle has already moved on. Because silence has never been neutral here. And it never protected anyone.