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An Arizona State University student says the institution racially profiled her when it used a photo of her and two friends to accompany an article about the need for more international students.
The student, Nshwah Ahmad, is a U.S. citizen -- she was born in Michigan -- as are the other two women in the photo, but Ahmad believes the university saw their head scarves in the photo and assumed they were from another country. "I feel like they were just looking for something," Ahmad told Arizona’s 12 News. "People now have a standard of what they feel America should look like."
Ahmad, a master’s student at Arizona State, posted about the incident on her Facebook account. She took a screenshot of the article, written by Michael Crow.
“Someone please tell me why on God's green earth ASU [and] Michael Crow [are] making an advertisement for ‘international students’ with a pic of me and two other Arabs,” Ahmad wrote on Facebook. "I’m laughing so hard but I’m also low-key offended … sorry, ladies, we are apparently not American.”
The article, published in The Christian Science Monitor, argues that international students enrich the experience of the entire student body.
“The more we engage globally and encourage the fullest possible intersection of people and ideas, the better equipped we will be to address the challenges that beset us,” Crow wrote.
The university has apologized to the women and replaced the photo in the article. Arizona State also released a statement about the incident, calling it a “mistake.”
“In our search for a compelling image on a tight deadline to go along with Dr. Crow’s op-ed, we passed along a picture to the publisher without doing enough due diligence on the people featured in it,” the statement said. “There is no excuse for the error, and apologies have been issued to the alumnae in the picture.”
