I don’t know how I didn’t see the waves of Islamophobic comments coming after hitting publish on my story about Assistant Professor of Religion Sajida Jalalzai’s tenure denial. I was just proud of a story well-reported and written — which, after a year in the making, I still am, to an extent. But my pride has since been drowned out by shame for the hate it has generated.

When the San Antonio Current picked up the article, I was happy that discourse about Jalalzai’s story was reaching a wider audience. I didn’t know that I was accidentally creating a forum for more Islamophobia in a comment section I couldn’t moderate. 

For the record, the Trinitonian does moderate comments on our own platforms. All comments are automatically approved, but if Editor-in-Chief Samara Gerstle and I decide a comment is defamatory speech, hate speech that is harmful to a person or group of people with shared characteristics, or speech that could compromise someone’s safety, we’ll take it down. 

But once a story is picked up elsewhere, our control over moderation disappears. What remains, unfortunately, is a public record of just how little the conversation had anything to do with Jalalzai’s scholarship. All I can do is read it and feel unearned guilt. 

As a journalist, and as the primary reporter on this story, I will not comment on whether Jalalzai’s case amounts to retaliation or discrimination on any basis. That’s neither my job nor my place.

But as a student at this school, as a person with a conscience who knows right from wrong and most importantly, as a Brown woman, I can write about how appalling almost every comment I’ve read on this article is. The merits of Jalalzai’s case or her scholarship have hardly been scrutinized. The fact that she wears a hijab has been, though. The religion she practices has been. The color of her skin has been. 

I’m not Muslim. I’m Hindu. And I can’t imagine the pain or anger that Jalalzai, or any Muslim person, might be feeling reading those comments. But I, like many people of color, know what it means to be reduced to a caricature of your religion or your skin. I’m used to being mocked for whichever ethnicity or religion someone passing by on the street assumes I am. I’ve been called a “dothead,” a “cow worshipper” and yes, even a “terrorist.” 

At the end of the day, though, it doesn’t take a particular faith or a string of slurs to see what’s going on. It’s the systematic flattening of people of color to our stereotypes — to make us more palatable, easier to argue with, easier to dismiss, easier to reduce. So, when I read through these comments, I don’t see debate. I see the familiar, disgusting pattern that has very little to do with Jalalzai’s case and everything to do with who she is and what she looks like. 

It’s not a difficult task to comment on the breadth of Jalalzai’s scholarly work. Maybe it is your opinion that it’s not up to snuff. Maybe you even disagree with her social media, or what she says about Palestine. Neither of these are excuses to call her, or all Muslims, a terrorist. It’s certainly not an excuse to bring in other professors and label them the same.

Her opinions can be scrutinized respectfully. Professors have told me they disagree with her claim, that she should’ve done more research. Good, I’m glad to hear it. People have said they agree with her claims, and she did enough research. Good, I’m glad to hear it. 

One comment on our website wrote about Jalalzai’s old tweets, saying that “If I was a student in her class and saw those tweets, I would not feel safe expressing disagreement without fear of retaliation.”

That’s an opinion, and it’s a fair one. Sometimes students do feel intimidated when their professors voice strong opinions publicly. It can make it seem like the odds are stacked against them. I understand that. The comments that followed debated her speech and whether it should factor into her tenure decision. To me, that is a reasonable conversation to have.

That is not the conversation most people are choosing to have.

Instead, the discussion has collapsed into something far uglier. There is a difference between questioning whether a professor deserved tenure and questioning whether she belongs in this country at all. There is a difference between questioning her opinions and calling for her to be shipped to Iran. One is discourse. The other is racism.

And several decades ago, the Trinitonian might not have put an Islamic studies professor on their front page at all. Even a few years ago, there might have been hesitation. In today’s newsroom, no one questioned whether putting a woman wearing a hijab on the front page was a good idea. We thought the piece about her was the most newsworthy story, so we put it on the front page. And that’s why this reaction is so devastating. 

Free speech is free speech, and I’ll always defend that. But if you can’t tell the difference between criticism and racism, then we were never having a real conversation to begin with.