honored to have professor send us and guest thank you thank you for having me pleasure you know before we go into that story the new york city story the marathon let's introduce you i was born in the early eighty's life three brothers were all within six years of each other in age and so we grew up playing sports together basketball soccer football everything was you know our backyard the my childhood was largely defined by athletic sports were very important to us growing up in school we would get through so that we could play the grades we would we would make the grades in order to get to be able to play on the soccer team in the basketball team so was running part of that my running story is similar to a lot of people if i didn't enjoy distance running when i was younger i joined the cross country team in high school as a way to supplement my soccer playing went to college also in san antonio texas and then i i didn't run there at all actually i continued playing sports but no no running the distance running really picked up when i moved to graduate school in boston and you know boston has a  races so you went to trinity university that's right yeah that's why i did my undergraduate were ok and what was your ex make yourself i did english english literature and religion or my two majors religion ok because you know a professor of religion that's right that's right attracted who religion i would say when i was in high school and college there was a period during which the country was thinking a lot about religion and politics you know my experience as someone who wears a turban and h facial hair and brown skin i experience quite a bit of discrimination especially after nine hundred and eleven thousand nine hundred and eleven happened when i was in high school and so very soon afterwards i entered into college and we're still dealing with backlash discrimination you know all of these issues and so for me understanding where these issues were coming from would really help me address that you're saying nine hundred and eleven that the to learn more about religion all kinds of religion that's right after nine hundred and eleven there was intense spot right around the country against anyone who looked to mosul and you know i'm not muslim personally but people see me and they think i am because i fit the stereotype ok and so for me experiencing what it felt like to be perceived as a most minute made me think a lot not just about my own identity but about what it must be like for people in different groups you know  is a majority a majority of san antonio is hispanic you know similar ethnic stereotypes there brown skin facial hair people who are latino were often confused as muslim and sure it's it's the world's th largest religion about thirty million followers worldwide the interesting thing about it is that people in the us tend to know very little about religion generally but particularly about the sick religion so growing up people just had no idea who i was or what i was about and if they ask me i would i would sort of share our basic values which are love compassion service and justice those are the things we strive for in our lives  one of the sort of i think most compelling aspects of our tradition that figures into running is we believe that every sick ought to be a saint soldier somebody who is focused on spiritual cultivation but also you respond to that well i would say you generally in our tradition the idea is that one need not be sick in order to attain god to its goal in our tradition is to be in love to find love within this life to be fully compassionate and so one does not have to be a six to do that one could be a christian or muslim or a jew or a hindu and so we don't have this belief that people have to follow our path in order to do so conversion has never been a part of our tradition if people are interested in learning more and joining they're welcome to and there's plenty of good information out there if people feel inspired by the six tradition and what they're really inspired by is this this concept of all signified royalty and so it used to be that only the elite in society could wear a turban and what our prophet said was that we believe that every human is divine every human is royal and so we want to empower everyone to have this unique identity you know you stand out in a crowd and you also embrace this insignia of royalty and so that's the idea behind the turban in terms of styles colors you get all sorts  know usually people try and match what they're wearing i'm not fashionable enough and so yeah i tend to stick with the browns and greys and blacks are simple enough you know the other day i saw my cousin wearing a polka dot shirt one day there will be one day soon there will be dry fit turbans that's all that's not there yet just recently the oldest marathoner in a row just retired and he had to be sleek and he was last run with like a ten marlin eight hundred and one that's right yeah he's incredible in fact he was the one who turned me on to distance running when i was in graduate school and boston you know i started running on my own i had just moved to new place to know that many friends and you know the culture there for running is great and after learning about this gentleman for just being and that he had completed a marathon at the age of one hundred i realized that i didn't have any excuses but if he could finish a marathon at one hundred then i should probably try and do want to twenty five and so that's actually when i signed up for my  was michael what a small world so he was one of my st coaches to get to meet all sorts of runners and running for somebody you know which we covering from kenya that's right it was very personally meaningful for me too because i was running in honor of some very close friends of mine who  dealing with cancer issues i was reading that empathy is very important in fact i think you know you teach but you know you meet with your students and talk about it so how does empathy play a role in your life i'd say th generally as a minority as someone who has experienced all sorts of discrimination growing up empathy has been it's a very important tool for people like me to maintain posit a positive spirit in the face of discrimination otherwise without empathy if i experienced discrimination in my world i'll just turn around and be angry right now that it's not fair and therefore i have the right to respond angrily or you know in a violent way what empathy allows me to do is when people hurl racist remarks at me or threats of some sort it allows me to take a moment and try and understand where they're coming from and if i can do that then i can engage with them in a way that might help make progress for them for myself and for our society but without empathy they're not there's no real conversation recently in the news i'm sure you illegitimate person a spot when she was confronted by because to time or knew about it knew it he cut the course the race director a soft heart believed he said i did it i did the it's not the st time i have been cheaters for whatever reason she won't be the last you know be another runner be exposed cheating but this one is resonates because maybe because of the can do in situations like this like you know we all make mistakes and when we make them we own them and i think that's helpful people respect so i think that's clearly number one and we've seen her come forward with an apology and so i think that's i think that's important other challenges come with this some of which we can address and some of which we can't really control and this is a lesson i've learned in my own life so one of the things that she can't control on her own is that our society is becoming so divided in this political context especially in the sort of trump era and sexism massaging me and racism have sort of emerged to the surface in a way that i haven't seen in my lifetime the types of remarks that i get on the street in the types of threats i get regularly or i have not experienced you know even after nine eleven and so i think it's important for her to recognize that she's an asian american woman that she is increasingly a target for people who are feeling embolden by bigotry right now and so i think some of it she has to recognize is not something she should be taking personally right it's not about her it's about her identity as an asian american woman i think that's very  important in terms of in terms of what she can do what she can try to do proactively what i would really say is in moments like this where people are being dehumanised the only solution we have before us is to try and humanize ourselves and i think it's it's a sad state of affairs when we sit here and say we have to recognize one another's humanity right that we should be better than that but unfortunately right now we're not as exciting and so whatever she can do to allow people to see her as a human and respect her basic human dignity for me what i see as effective is putting yourself there and telling your stories right there is sort of where we are today and i'm you know i've i was open about the fact that i got you know at the new york city marathon this year and i've been open about it you know whenever i experience it but it's because well she's not really a person in the internet allows us to do that so so what i would advise her in this is a tough thing to you know not everybody can do this but if she's willing if she's able to just put herself out there it'll come with a lot more vulnerability it'll come and with a lot more attacks she's been threatened with rape people have told her she should commit suicide you know really really nasty stuff and i find it ridiculous it's it's  marathon i was running independently i qualified through the nine plus one through new york road runners and and let's see in terms of you know i receive abuse from time to time right not always but from time to time  when i'm running alone in central park that's my usual running spot sometimes in races of a few times during the marathon in the past but this year was the worst and it fits right into the pattern of hate incidents that's what the country over the last year what happened in that context you know i was running around mile ten somebody i reach for water a woman pulled it back and called me a dirty muslim and then everybody started laughing like my old twenty i was definitely too tired to even think about it i would think i was dying at that point i was hitting the wall and so i didn't even want to deal with it but wrote partner is currently you must have tweeted of somebody tweeted to something happened because the story i read to jonathan cain's posting that they reached out to you and that let you know that they had your back that's right i have made this commitment to myself over the last two years that anytime i receive any sort of racial abuse i make it public and i don't do that to get attention for myself but really i found that this is the only way that people who don't experience what i experience can really know what it's like and so i actually pulled out my phone during the marathon each time something happened and by the time i finished i didn't check my phone actually for probably an hour after the race i was recovering but then i i opened up my twitter and saw that i had a message from that i had a voicemail from anywhere as well as offering support to asking me  could get more details i gave them a call back one of the things that i've learned in my experience is that for every one hateful remark i receive i receive hundreds of positive response right in people saying you know these this is not what people really think that's really encouraging i've gotten into the bad habits of you know the podcasts and the music while running i'm a solo runner like everything else has to balance sometimes you need that solo me time to write and sometimes you get all the benefits from running with  some years ago your own running club right tell us about that we started a running club that focused primarily on unsafe americans and one of the reasons there were a number of reasons one of one of the reasons was as i go to these races i would never see anybody who looked like me and you know the fact of the matter is that we say that running is for everybody but it is a sport of privilege that generally if you go to races especially outside of new york city you know you're the socio economic classes high that races are expensive training costs a lot of money a lot of time and not everybody can afford it and so i really wanted to think about how do i get my own community into fitness share something that i love with them and for me personally i've always seen running as a way to shatter people stereotypes so by just being out there and running in central park you know hundreds of people see me out there and doing something that they wouldn't and some couple rush you stop and it is funny and you know the there's racism built into that and so it's based on a stereotype but it's honestly it's better than the negative you know hateful stereotypes that we usually experience so i welcome you know  the humor and that sort of story but you know i was i was outside my apartment waiting for my wife and daughter and my daughter just been born maybe she was three months or so at the time we live on the upper east side so i was a bed pulled up the car my wife was brain down the baby and a couple  know i'm not sure i'm not your driver and they said oh this isn't uber and i said oh no it's not you know they sort of looked at each other sheepishly i saw them through my through my mare and i was kind of laughing i thought it was funny  and then the woman just sort of leans forward and she goes well can you take us anywhere we'll put you extra extra extra so my wife and daughter hadn't been there i might have asked how much she would pay me because i don't know  why i think there is a stereotype of what a what a taxi driver in the state he looks like many of the sick immigrants here in new york city or are taxi drivers and so if you watch movies that hollywood plays on these fight by the i was also tweeting while running about all the love i was getting so people would see me and say look there goes the saying seeing is a sort of a standard last name for six so they see me and they go oh mr singh there goes you know and then people would start cheering it happens especially in brooklyn that people just get very excited like look at the sick man look at mr saying so these are sort of my standard experience with us in the marathon it's it's it's really powerful because i don't actually wear a shirt with my name on it or i don't in for the for our running club we try to build in justice issues into our runs and what that means is we'll sort of gather often on occasions of sort of social or political conflict and we'll use that as moments to discuss and then we so talk for a while we warm up and then as we sort of filter off into groups people have an opportunity to just chat about whatever they're thinking about with regard to those issues so it's turned into a really interesting sort of group that i haven't seen anywhere else where it actually becomes about justice issues as opposed to you know the sort of more small talk types of things that you know you or i might discuss while running you know i would tell me people the only yeah i its true and my wife can't get me to go shopping for regular clothes but if it's if it's time for running clothes then yeah i'm on board but to really put it when my wife before he he started running he would myself or my sister in law in the past have been sort of guiding people through it but the races are generally short i think we did we did a half marathon once but everything else has been shorter because there is a race that is organized by this a community out in queens  it just started a couple of years ago ok by a gentleman who has now run the marathon i think twenty three times to new york city so he started a running group out there started a race out there it's a five k and so a lot of times very interesting time to be teaching religion i think one of the one of the challenges i'm finding is that americans generally just don't know about other cultures religions countries you know anything  and so to be introducing different religious traditions to eighteen year olds for the st time is simply a challenge it's it's trying to shape how they understand the world within three months that's a big challenge and i think it's tough for them to you know they're being fed all sorts of misinformation you know media and they don't know what to do with it and as they look online they find the same problems and then started going to have signed up for the new york city this and i'm hoping to actually train this year as opposed to supposed to last year and i just got my my running stroller just came so i'm excited about you know taking the taking the baby girl out for runs now and getting her excited about running culture