Being in a pageant was always on the top
of my bucket list ever since I was little.
And when I finally got it, I was super excited.
The day after I was announced as Ms. Michigan,
I got a call from the state director
and she said that my Tweets were deemed insensitive,
racist and Islamophobic.
I said what exact Tweets are you talking about?
She sent me two links to the Tweets.
None of them in my opinion were racist or Islamophobic.
The first Tweet was about black on black violence.
This is actually in response to another person
and this person has been Tweeting cops kills black people.
And I responded, did you know the majority of black deaths
are caused by other black people?
So fix problems within your own community
before lashing out and blaming
this narrative on other people.
In context, I was specifically replying
to how cops kill black people and that is why
I referenced black on black violence.
The second Tweet was about hijab day at my school.
The girl went up to me and said,
hey do you wanna try on this hijab? And I said no thank you.
I was already late for class, so I left.
Later that day, I posted this picture on social media.
The statement I posted with the picture was,
is this a religious garment or is this a fashion statement?
Initially when they told me to try on a hijab,
I was a bit taken aback by it.
Because I feel like if I was a Muslim,
I would be offended that people would try on this garment
just for fun and that's what was deemed Islamophobic.
I lost my crown just last month.
These Tweets were posted about a year or two years ago.
And it was not relevant at all during
the time I was Ms. Michigan.
Since I lost the crown, my life has been hectic.
I've been crying a lot of nights.
Some of the most harmful things I've read
on social media about this, was that I'm a racist
and that the university should kick me out
because I'm such an intolerant person.
The people who preach for tolerance and call me racist
are the same people who call me slant eyed, dog eater,
flat face and other racial slurs.
I've had over 1,000 death threats
on all forms of social media.
But it doesn't really affect me anymore
because there's so many of them.
I think people on social media
are way too sensitive nowadays.
Even if they are proven wrong,
they still want to lash out at you.
Okay.
Tell me what you thought was gonna happen
when you wrote that?
Anything, nothing, something?
Were you tryin' to create dialogue?
Why did you write anything at all?
I mean since 2016, I've been an active
political commentator on social media
and I started in high school.
And these Tweets were actually written two years ago.
When I wrote those, I just wanted to express my opinion.
I wanted to express how I felt in that situation
and you know, to back it up with sums of facts
or some pictures.
Do you stand by what you said in that particular quote?
And the quote was, "Did you know the majority
"of black deaths are caused by other blacks?
"Fix problems within your own community first
"before blaming others."
And you were responding to another Tweet,
that said stop killing black people.
Correct.
Which was in reference to police actions right?
Yes.
So do you stand by that?
Completely, yeah.
Everything I said in that Tweet
was backed up by FBI statistics.
And you're referring to FBI stats on homicide data.
And I put some of those up.
White victim total 3,567 homicides in 2017.
White offenders, 2,861, 80.21%
Black or African American victim total 2,970 homicides.
Black or African American offenders, 2,627, which is 88.45.
So that's what you're talking about
when you say that most of black deaths
are by black offenders.
Yes, yes.
When you see my Tweet by itself without the context of it,
of course it looks bad.
But I was referring to another Tweet
and I actually quoted it on my Twitter account.
But here's the thing, particularly if you aspire
to a position of high visibility, high recognizability,
where you're representing your state, and all of that,
is Twitter a place to have a serious conversation?
Is it irresponsible to sum this up
in 140 characters or less?
I mean, if you're gonna have a serious discussion about
this, you need to talk about all the different statistics.
I get invited onto newscasts all the time
on cable news and stuff.
And I say, what's gonna happen?
Well we've got a three minute window here,
we want you to talk about race relations.
I say no thank you.
No thank you.
I'm not gonna discuss a 200 year history
of race relations in America in three minutes.
Thank you, no, that is an insult to the people involved.
It's an insult to the topic.
Is trivializes it and I won't be part of that.
So I say no. (audience applauding)
When was the last time you saw me on one of those shows
talkin' about that stuff? Oh never.
Never. (chuckling)