“We all need to stay vigilant and do what we can if/when we witness something like this.”

Photo by PoPville flickr user Dean M

“Dear PoPville,

Sunday afternoon, as I was walking through Adams Morgan, I heard yelling. I saw a cab driver, in his cab, and a man and woman standing outside of the taxi. The driver and the man on the sidewalk were yelling at one another. I heard the guy on the sidewalk yell, “Yeah, well you’re the terrorist!” I then said, “Wait, did you just call him a terrorist? You can’t do that. You can’t talk to someone like that!” His companion put her hand over his mouth, and with some effort, shoved him into their building, as he was still trying to yell. The driver then approached me, visibly shaken, and said that he is Ethiopian, and as he was driving this couple, he was listening to an Ethiopian radio station.

The male passenger said, “I don’t want to listen to Al Jazeera.”

The driver explained that it wasn’t. The passenger asked if the driver was Muslim, and when he said that he is, the passenger called him a mother**** terrorist. What I walked into was a continuation of that. The driver was understandably really upset. He didn’t want to report the incident, so there was not much that could be done other than to say how sorry I was that he experienced what he did.

Just a reminder to all of us that we don’t live in a bubble. We all need to stay vigilant and do what we can if/when we witness something like this.