Whose bigotry is accepted in America?

I usually don't have morbid hypothetical scenarios running through my head.

But the airbrushing of Charlie Kirk's legacy by millions of mostly white Americans has left me wondering how differently they might react if someone like Ye, the rapper formerly known as Kanye West, or Louis Farrakhan, were shot to death.

I doubt this crowd — both the Kirk enthusiasts and the men and women who say they "didn't always agree" with the Arlington Heights native's extreme, right-wing worldview — would fall into the same amnesiac trance if asked to articulate the offending traits of either Black personality.

While many people have tiptoed around Kirk's anti-Black, anti-Muslim, anti-Jewish, anti-immigrant, transphobic, homophobic and misogynist sound bites, they likely wouldn't hesitate in identifying antisemitism as the central source of the musician's and Nation of Islam leader's notoriety.

Ye and Farrakhan’s bigoted statements, which they have been rightfully criticized for, would quickly bubble to the surface of every ensuing posthumous profile and roundtable discussion — the consensus being the men's hate ultimately tainted their talent and whatever goodwill they had to offer.

Maybe in the case of Ye, his obituary would include a perfunctory mention of his odious "slavery was a choice" quote and the principled “George Bush doesn’t care about Black people” declaration he cried out during a Hurricane Katrina concert fundraiser two decades ago.

Ye and Farrakhan's fatherhood won't placate their sins when they no longer walk the earth.

There will be no breathless write-ups in the mainstream press.

There will be no sports stadium tributes.

And if Ye and Farrakhan's lives were ever taken by another African American, many elected leaders wouldn't be devastated that the alleged perpetrator turned out to be “one of us” and not the foreigner they had prayed for. Then, the conversation would quickly pivot to the challenges of "Black-on-Black crime."

To be clear, I am not making light of or condoning Kirk's killing. I also don't want any harm to come to Ye, Farrakhan or anyone else.

Gun violence doesn't discriminate and continues to chip away at our sense of security, destroying countless families in its wake. This harsh reality continually stares in our faces, in spite of the lawmakers who pretend they don't see or are OK with the bloodshed.

For those of us who belong to marginalized groups, the aftermath of Kirk's fatal shooting also serves as a reminder that many fellow Americans share his disturbing stances or are willing to normalize what came out of his mouth.

Bigotry can be window dressed as "political" speech if you're the right color and a member of an accepted faith, particularly Christianity.

So I'm not surprised some liberals who wanted the racially and religiously diverse pro-Palestinian protests to disappear on college campuses agree with Ezra Klein's assertion that Kirk "was practicing politics the right way" when he turned up at universities.

As a Brown Muslim woman, I'm uncomfortably familiar with these double standards.

For a long time after 9/11, Muslims in America faced scrutiny for what they didn't say. If a Muslim halfway around world was accused of detonating a bomb, killing civilians, demands to apologize and condemn the slaughter flooded in.

Many mosque elders obediently complied to prove we were good, peace-loving citizens. Years later, younger generations, who came of age at the height of the "War on Terror," pointed out the dangers of condemning atrocities we had nothing to do with.

Such condemnations only exacerbate Islamophobia, as they "involve the tacit acceptance of a racist narrative in which Muslims are collectively presumed guilty of harboring violent tendencies and terrorist sympathies unless proven otherwise," a 2023 research paper concluded.

The condemnations, the author stated, also "keep the focus on Muslims and violence so that white and white Christian Americans and Europeans need not come to terms with their own violent past and their ongoing complicity in a violent world order."

The author, Todd Green, by the way, is white and a former Presbyterian minister, for those readers who want me to condemn his scholarly work.

I thought Muslims were done being forced to play this ridiculous game of condemnation.

But over the summer, Zohran Mamdani was repeatedly asked to denounce the phrase “globalize the intifada” — a term New York City's Democratic mayoral candidate never uttered. Ultimately, Mamdani said he would discourage its use but refused to condemn the slogan, which many say conveys solidarity with Palestinians and others translate as violence against Israel.

Many Americans are frightened this Muslim immigrant, who has expressed "a belief in universal human rights," may soon be at the helm of the country's largest city.

Kirk didn't hold public office. But it is the far reach of his ideologies that scares me.

Rummana Hussain is a columnist and leads the opinion coverage at the Sun-Times.