HOW OUR AAUP CHAPTER RESPONDED to POSTELECTION VIOLENCE

Eighteen-year-old Nasro Hassan, a new first-year student at the University of Washington, walked out of her class at Mary Gates Hall at about 5:45 PM. on Nov 15, 2016. It was dark and, this being Seattle in the fall, raining. It was also a week after the startling US presidential election. Like lots of people on American campuses, Hassan was looking down at her phone as she walked to the light-rail station. Unlike many others, however, she was wearing a hijab. As she walked, a man in a black hooded sweatshirt and dark jeans ran up to her with what might have been a glass bottle and slammed the object into the right side of her face, near her eye. He laughed as he ran off. Within a couple of days of the incident, Hassan went to the Seattle office of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) for support.