He was supposed to be one of the good guys: A white doctor with black patients practicing in Harlem. Professor at Columbia. A national leader against white racism. Frequent guest on the Huffington Post, New York Times and other liberal outlets. Active in UN public health initiatives for poor people.
He even lives in Harlem. So when Dr. Prabhjot Singh decided he would stroll through his neighborhood last Saturday night, he figured he was safe. 311
After all, he said to Huffington Post about his Harlem neighbors: “It’s one thing to be told in the news or in a book that a community is not as dangerous as you thought they were. But it’s completely another thing to know somebody personally. Understanding really comes from deeper engagement.” And no one was more deeply engaged that Dr. Singh.
Then four blocks from Malcolm X Boulevard in September of 2013, Dr. Singh met up with 20 black people on bikes, also craving a deeper kind of engagement. A violent one:312
“I heard ‘Get Osama’ and then ‘terrorists,’ and then the next thing I felt was someone moving past me, ripping at my beard and then hitting me in the chin.” He ran. They chased him and knocked him down and beat him some more.
Singh said he thought he could have died if passersby had not intervened to help fight off the dozens of black men who jumped him.
They broke his jaw. Kicked out a few of his teeth. And all that.
Dr. Singh is a Sikh, a faith where members wear distinctive turbans and beards. But this mob thought he was a Moslem and taunted him for that. Not knowing that Moslems and Sikhs are rivals.
Dr. Singh is also white. Caucasian. His family has been in the United States for generations. Though it is strange how many people who believe that being a Sikh makes him a member of a separate racial group.
After the attack, Dr. Singh wondered why anyone would bother him: He is, after all, an American and resident of Harlem. He told professor Lamont Hill over at MSNBC:313 “This is not the Harlem I know,” he said. “If anything, [this experience] makes me more committed to our community and the work we do there.”
Singh wrote in 2012 an op-ed for the New York Times that the biggest danger of hate crimes to Sikhs was from white racism. He cited that six times in one article: “There is also the question of whether white supremacist groups have specifically targeted American Sikhs,” Singh said. His commentary was in response to the killing of six Sikhs in Wisconsin by a neo-Nazi. 314
But in Harlem that Saturday night, there was nary a white face to be found. Besides his, that is. Police released surveillance video that showed the attackers were black.315
But the same man who relentlessly condemned white racism for violence against Sikhs all of a sudden became circumspect about the race of his attackers. And eager to explain it away.
When Dr. Hill from the Huffington Post asked him to describe the assailants, Singh said:316
They were young men. Probably from the neighborhood. Certainly not reflective of the neighborhood I’ve come to know and work in.
It was dark. They seemed like they were young African American men. But again, it was dark.
No one wants to blame the victim. But neither does it make sense to let the victim perpetuate the myths surrounding how safe non-black people are in black neighborhoods. As Ray Widstrand found out.