Dr. Lincoln Malik was one of hundreds of foreign students who arrived at Kansas State University in the early 1960s.
To boost the school’s global reputation, the university president sought to put Manhattan, Kansas, on the map by recruiting top scholars from around the world. As one of Iraq’s highest-achieving students, Malik fit the bill.
But the ambitious plan, Malik said, came at a cost for the newly enrolled students.
“We had to go and deal with the racism that existed at that time among the people,” Malik recalled. “They made it very clear that they did not want to have anything to do with us. So very quickly for me, it was us that were foreign students versus them that were the white American students.”
Facing discrimination
Growing up Assyrian in the 1940s and 1950s in al-Bataween, a neighborhood in Baghdad, Malik was no stranger to an “us versus them” dynamic between his Christian community and the Muslim majority.
But the prejudice he encountered at Kansas State felt different.
“In Iraq, although there was discrimination, the Arabs and Kurds and Muslims didn’t look down upon us,” he said. “When I came to Kansas State, these people really looked down upon us as though we were inferior.”
His first major exposure with discrimination came early in the fall of 1960, when he struggled to find housing. Students were required to live in university-approved accomodations, but a school survey showed nearly 70% of homeowners refused to rent to non-American students, and fewer than 10% would rent to anyone who wasn’t white.
That left Malik with few options. His first room, in the basement of a building, was unfit for living.
“The mildew on the walls was as tall as my head,” he recalled.
In another shared house for international students, he remembered white students shutting off the electricity and water. Classrooms offered little refuge: for group projects, he often couldn’t find white students willing to work with him.
A growing activist
Outspoken against injustice since his youth, where he advocated for Assyrian rights, Malik established himself as a campus activist. He spoke up for foreign, Black, and Native American students, protested the Vietnam War, and defended the Palestinian cause.
Writing for the student newspaper sharpened his voice. When white writers referred to foreign students as GDFS — “God-Damn Foreign Students” — Malik countered by calling white students “natives.”
When confronted about it, he told them, “You come to our countries and call us natives. If that’s the proper word for you to use there, why can’t I use it when I come to your country?”
His activism came to a head at the student union when a white student shouted a slur at the co-chair of the university’s Black student organization. Malik pushed through the crowd and punched the heckler.
In the days that followed, leaders of the Black Student Union invited Malik to join. He became the group’s only non-Black member.
Discouraged by his outspoken nature, a white student approached him to join a fraternity — but only if he quit the Organization of Arab Students and stopped sitting at the Black table in the student union. When Malik refused, the student tried to entice him by selling fraternity life as parties and dates with sorority women. Malik still declined.
A lifetime of social justice work
Malik continued his activism during his studies at UC Berkeley and Stanford. In 1991, he co-founded the Assyrian Aid Society of America in response to Saddam Hussein’s policies toward Assyrians and the impact of the Gulf War.
Recent Black Lives Matter demonstrations in the United States echo the struggles Assyrians face in the Middle East, he argued.
“Since our homeland was taken from us by others, they have historically and are currently claiming that our lives do not matter and we have been oppressed and denied rights,” he said. “If we do not believe in their movement, then we are denying our own movement.”
Advocacy remains essential to him because he believes many students lack exposure to histories beyond their white experience, leading some to see non-white students as inferior.
“The people who understand our situation best are people that they themselves are living in oppression of one kind or another,” he said. “They might not have a lot to give to us but friendship and understanding. But that means a lot more to me than trying to get understanding or pity from an oppressor who oppresses other people.”
Listen to Dr. Lincoln Malik’s full story on The Assyrian Podcast, hosted by Peter Ibrahim