Update on the Muslim NYU student who wrote a NYT op-ed vilifying her roommate for supporting Trump.

Now — 17 days later — the NYT has published the roommate's response.

When the first op-ed came out, I was very critical:

Whatever happened to diversity? [The NYU freshman Romaissaa] Benzizoune had originally thought her roommate was like her, but then she was "this suddenly strange person." Benzizoun's college experience turned into something universities normally encourage: confrontation and dealing with diversity. 

Benzizoune's response was to reject her roommate and to go out and find a more homogeneous group to hang around with. And then she outed the roommate to the whole world, exposing her to contempt and hostility in The New York Times.

After gaining access through the imposed intimacy of roommateship in a university that (I'm sure) promotes diversity, she betrayed this woman — who is perhaps  18 years old — and invited hatred. She did it deliberately, with fervor, and facilitated by the most powerful newspaper in America.

And it seemed justified. Why?

The new op-ed from the roommate, K.N. Pineda, reveals that she has been glared at and heckled on campus:

I have been labeled “racist,” “sexist” and “xenophobic” on Facebook. I have been called a “white without a conscious,” a “misogynist,” a “bigot” and a “barbarian” online by people all over the country. 

She defends herself by telling us that her father is Hispanic and her mother was raised by an African-American stepfather. One defense when you are reviled as white is to trot out proof that you are not white or not that white. It's kind of sad to see a young woman forced into the public light and then having to reveal private facts about other people because it's so threatening to be thought of as a person of white privilege. Her grandmother's husband "died after struggling with drug addiction and alcoholism." Her father "grew up in a trailer home." Her mother "was homeless for a period of time." Do all these people now get a NYT op-ed to tell their story?

Pineda does get around to begging us to rise above racial differences:

The answer is not to further the divide by labeling and dehumanizing one another. We should fight the “us versus them” mind-set.... How can we assume we know someone based on the color of their skin, their religion, or their political choices?... The narrative should be one of inclusiveness, openness, respect and love. It is not only about making “America Great Again,” it is about making America home again.

She's getting pilloried in the comments over there. From the top-rated comments:

Pleading for understanding, but where's the understanding for how support for Trump might look to others who've been victimized by Trump's brand of racism, sexual predation, financial exploitation, failure to pay taxes, etc.? While professing wonderful bromides, I find the writer a bit disingenuous.

And:

People didn't call you racist because they are ignorant of your family history. They find your beliefs complacent. Trump and his followers will destroy civil liberties. The echoes of Nazi Germany are present; the anger of the right is far more violent than the anger of the left. You experienced FB harassment-- my kids' school experienced Nazi symbols on Twitter. Will you stand up, Ms. Pineda?

And:

If the narrative should be one of inclusiveness, openness, respect and love -- what are you doing supporting the candidate championed avidly white supremacists? The candidate whose VP thinks that homosexuals should be subjected to electric shocks to make them "normal"? 

Etc. etc. This young lady cannot have her private life back. 

"When she outed herself to me as a Trump supporter, I realized I had finally found the 'silent majority.'"

"I looked at her, this suddenly strange girl who sleeps a few feet away from me, my college roommate. The silent majority has seen me put on my head scarf in the morning and take it off at night. The silent majority has touched my face, done my makeup, watches 'Gilmore Girls' religiously. The silent majority occasionally enjoys sliced mango before bed. We fought; I packed. This was Tuesday evening, so I headed to my friend’s dorm, where a small group of us, mainly black women, tried to find solace in one another as the country slowly fell to red. I tried and failed to speak, to write. I ignored my roommate’s lengthy texts...."

So begins Romaissaa Benzizoune, an NYU freshman, who has an op-ed in the NYT titled, "I’m Muslim, but My Roommate Supports Trump."

I thought that was well written. It made me want to read to the end of the story. Do the friends make up?

I got to "it is no surprise that our argument proved hopeless" and  "There was no reasoning with her" and "My roommate’s reasoning reflected an 'us versus them' mind-set mind-set that has defined this nation for as long as it has existed" — that's in the middle of the column — and I felt queasy.

The roommate is a specific, identifiable individual. She might as well have her name printed in The New York Times. We haven't the details of the argument or anything close to a quotation of what the very young woman may have said. We hear only the conclusion: She was immune to reason and stuck in a mind-set that is stereotypically American. I'm stunned by the unfairness toward this real person.

I read to the end of the piece. I finally encounter a quote from that unnamed, identifiable individual called "my roommate." It's a 2-word quote:

My roommate’s main defense of Mr. Trump during our argument was that he didn’t mean the “stupid things” he said. 

The writer rejects any comfort that might lie in the notion that Trump didn't mean all the things he said. She ends, not with any reconciliation with the roommate, but distancing herself from this person she has lived with in close contact. The writer dedicates herself to writing and to the masses of people who are not in the group with her roommate:

Now that an us-versus-them system has been voted into office, I want to write for those who feel like the latter, the “them.”

And that's where she ends, convinced that it's an us-versus-them system, that her roommate — her nameless but identifiable roommate — is the other, and hot to intensify the us-versus-themness of it all.

ADDED: Whatever happened to diversity? Benzizoune had originally thought her roommate was like her, but then she was "this suddenly strange person." Benzizoun's college experience turned into something universities normally encourage: confrontation and dealing with diversity. 

Benzizoune's response was to reject her roommate and to go out and find a more homogeneous group to hang around with. And then she outed the roommate to the whole world, exposing her to contempt and hostility in The New York Times.

After gaining access through the imposed intimacy of roommateship in a university that (I'm sure) promotes diversity, she betrayed this woman — who is perhaps  18 years old — and invited hatred. She did it deliberately, with fervor, and facilitated by the most powerful newspaper in America.

And it seemed justified. Why?

UPDATE: 17 days later, the NYT publishes an op-ed by the roommate, who says:

My roommate has since apologized to me, but in the meantime I have felt the glare of her friends and been heckled on campus by other students. I have been labeled “racist,” “sexist” and “xenophobic” on Facebook. I have been called a “white without a conscious,” a “misogynist,” a “bigot” and a “barbarian” online by people all over the country.

She proceeds to tell us about her background, as if she needs to distance herself from the white-privilege slur with the news that she's half-Hispanic. But she's mostly conciliatory, eager to encourage us to all get along.