In the Media

At the tail end of what might go down in history as Ferguson Summer, Americans are debating whether police training and protocols sufficiently address racial stereotypes and the use of deadly force. A string of high-profile police killings of unarmed black men have dominated headlines, but the Ohio shooting of 22-year-old African-American John Crawford in a Walmart, by a white officer, raises some of the most complicated questions.

The Tayba Islamic Center is a small storefront mosque on the southern tip of Coney Island Avenue in Brooklyn. Sandwiched between a kitchen-cabinet shop and a Jewish daycare center, its main identifying feature is a miniature dome that juts out of the green awning. This modest house of worship has a congregation that mainly consists of Pakistani New Yorkers—including Abdul Manaf, the mosque’s spokesman. On the evening of July 18, during the final ten days of Ramadan, Manaf received a call summoning him to the center. Three elderly men, all in native Pakistani dress and each on his way to Tayba, had been pelted with eggs by people driving around in a white Lexus and yelling, “This is for your Allah!” The attack stunned the old men and shook others, including the mosque’s imam, who called 911 and then telephoned Manaf. He drove directly to the center to find a speechless 70-year-old Sabir Toppa, egg shells in his hair, the yolk still dripping down his face.

CARRYING SIGNS with messages like "Black Lives Matter" and "We Are Human," thousands of New York City residents and people from the surrounding area marched in Staten Island on August 23 to demand justice for Eric Garner and other victims of police brutality and violence.

The attitude of those on the march was summed up by Leah, who said, "We're tired of our young people being shot and killed for no reason other than racism. We're not savages or animals. We're not going to take this anymore. Every time a young man gets shot, we're going to come out."