The bold, unsilenced face of U.S. bigotry

Were decades of peaceful integration a facade?

Over a long weekend of fireworks, face paint and flags, Fernando Herboso couldn’t stop thinking about the new America he encountered last week. Herboso, 58, and his brother Carlos have their own real estate agency, and they were showing a Muslim couple — a U.S. military veteran and his wife — a sweet home in Frederick, Md., that seemed just perfect. The neighbourhood even had a clubhouse with a party room, an exercise room, tennis courts and a pool. Carlos took the couple there to check it out. Turns out, the neighbourhood also had hate. A woman lounging at the pool took one look at his client’s hijab and said it loud and clear: “We don’t want Muslims in our clubhouse. Take off that robe over your head!” she boomed.

Carlos, 44, was flummoxed. He wanted to confront the woman, but didn’t want to cause a scene. He instead went to the clubhouse manager, who was horrified and apologized, frantically saying that the woman does not represent her diverse community.

The couple, who were used to such attacks, were gracious. They’re still house-hunting in Frederick.

But this is not where the Herboso brothers’ story — or their shock — ends.

Islamophobic attacks and other hate crimes are spiking sharply in the U.S., especially since Donald Trump began suggesting that America ban Muslims.

Data from the FBI said that in past years, there have been a little more than a dozen suspected hate crimes against Muslims reported every month.

But since the attacks in Paris and the ramp-up of American nationalist rhetoric, including Trump’s suggestion that we create a nationwide registry of Muslims, that rate has roughly tripled.

Fernando Herboso glimpsed the change in sentiment a few months ago. He was showing a different Muslim family a house, also in the Maryland suburbs. Their young daughter needed to use the bathroom. The water had been turned off at the house, so Fernando asked a neighbour who was outside gardening.

The woman glanced over Fernando’s shoulder and saw the family, wearing traditional Muslim garb. She wordlessly turned her back to him, went inside her house and — click — locked the door.

Herboso posted something on a real estate agent’s forum, wondering whether others have seen an increase in such bold displays of bigotry and whether they thought it was a new division sowed by Trump’s politics. What he heard back, he said, was “disheartening.”

“My post somehow gave my colleagues in real estate permission to reach out to me with hateful comments about my Hispanic heritage,” said Herboso, who was born in Bolivia. “I never experienced that before. I arrived to the U.S. in 1977 and have been a proud American since 1982.”

In 25 years in real estate, many running his own company, he never felt discriminated against. He shut anyone down with hard work and his effusive love for America.

And suddenly, he was being attacked by agents he saw as his peers. Guys who bantered MLS listings with him fired off nasty emails and even made phone calls urging him to go back to his country.

It felt, he said, “like they were wearing masks all these years. And they just took them off.”

Here is the part that was so shocking to both Herboso brothers — the silence they misunderstood for decades. All these years, it wasn’t untainted friendliness.

It was racism and skepticism and hatred all along, Fernando said.

“I remember coming to D.C. and riding the Metro. And I wasn’t a Hispanic on the Metro. I was just a person next to someone Chinese and someone Indian and someone Mexican. And we were all just people on the Metro.”

And now, “I have to think that the racism part was always there,” Herboso said. “But it was silenced.” He’s worried not just as an American, but as a parent. “I have a son, he is 8,” Fernando said. “I don’t want anybody to look at him like he’s illegal. I want them to see him as a person. As an American.” Petula Dvorak is a columnist for the Washington Post.