I have brown skin, because I happen to have been born in Pakistan. But I'm also an atheist. I spent most of life in Canada. And yesterday, was the first time in my life that someone actually came up to me and yelled islamophobic insults at me. It was some old guy. I told him, I'm not a muslim and he didn't believe me. He told me to go back to my own country. I told him I renounced my Pakistani citizenship long ago and that Canada is the only country that I am citizen of. He didn't seem to understand me and just kept on reiterating the "go back to your own country" bullshit.
I was surprised that something like this hadn't happened to me sooner. I've gone 18 years without experiencing something like this. Maybe it was just an isolated incident. I know that the majority of Canadians I've interacted with were decent and tolerant people. But it did piss me off quite a bit, that I was associated with the scumbags in ISIS based entirely on my skin colour. Dismiss this as random whining if you wish but I feel that stuff like this is a legitimate problem. What I experienced wasn't that bad but other non-muslim brown people haven't been so lucky. It's quite frustrating to read an article about Sikh people being targeted because a pack of viscous bigots were too stupid to tell the difference between Sikhs and Muslims: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/0...n_1751841.html