Cops Are Hunting the Masked Man Behind America's Latest Racist Shooting

A 39-year-old Sikh was shot in his driveway outside Seattle Friday night while working on his car, and police are still searching for the six-foot-tall white man in a mask who the victim heard say, "Go back to your own country," while carrying out the attack. Both the local police and the FBI are investigating the nonfatal incident, as it represents the second possible hate crime against people of Indian descent in as many weeks in what some fear augurs to a new climate of fear for people of South Asian origin.

The previous attack took place in a Kansas bar on February 22, when 51-year-old Adam Purinton allegedly shot two Indian men and one other patron while yelling, "Get out of my country." The death of 32-year-old engineer Srinivas Kuchibhotla was front-page news in India, where some were quick to suggest the anti-immigrant rhetoric of Donald Trump might have been a factor in the crime. Meanwhile, press secretary Sean Spicer initially said that correlation was "a bit absurd," although the White House has since conceded the crime was likely a result of "racially motivated hatred."

The FBI is investigating the Kansas shooting as a hate crime, and the Sikh Coalition, an advocacy group based out of New York, called for the agency to do the same in Washington State, where the victim was said to be recovering.

"While we appreciate the efforts of state and local officials to respond to attacks like this, we need our national leaders to make hate crime prevention a top priority," Coalition program manager Rajdeep Singh told the Hindustan Times.

Of course, even if that happens and federal charges are filed against the assailant in this case, it seems unlikely he will be officially labeled a terrorist. That's at least in part because the United States government lacks any statute to label suspects as terrorists if they haven't coordinated with people overseas in carrying out their crimes. Charleston church shooter Dylann Roof and Robert Duggart––a Tennessee man who planned to burn down a mosque in upstate New York––were probably not labeled as terrorists by federal prosecutors at least in part for this very reason.

Anti-Sikh brutality isn't exactly novel in modern America: Most infamously, in 2012, a white man walked into a Sikh Temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, and opened fire, killing six and injuring three others. And a Sikh temple in Buena Park, California, was vandalized after the San Bernardino terrorist attacks in late 2015, a testament to the what seems like a consistent theme of Americans not knowing the difference between Sikhs and Muslims.

In another shooting late last week that so far has not been linked to allegations of  hate or terrorism, an American of Indian descent was shot and killed outside his residence in South Carolina.

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The rules for prosecuting right-wing extremists aren't likely to get tougher under the Trump administration, either. On the contrary, a reported (and still pending) rejiggering of the Department of Homeland Security would have the US government's Countering Violent Extremism program focus solely on Islamic terrorism.

Meanwhile, President Trump urged Americans to "fight bigotry, intolerance, and hatred in all of its very ugly forms" after a series of bogus bomb threats to Jewish Community Centers and actual graveyard vandalism across the country. But in responding to this latest incident, Singh, the Sikh Coalition leader, seemed to speak for many of the people of color Trump antagonized throughout his campaign—and has spooked once again so far during his tenure in office.

"Tone matters in our political discourse, because this a matter of life or death for millions of Americans who are worried about losing loved ones to hate," he said.

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