Graduation Day LA: Muslim teenager uses satirical YouTube videos to cope with bullying

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Most of high school senior Asfand Latif’s friends aren’t Pakistani or Muslim like he is. They don’t follow the strict rules of his faith – he can’t date girls, go out on Friday nights, or even share a pepperoni pizza.

When Asfand started feeling like he had little in common with his friends outside of mosque, he decided to do something about it. He wanted to bridge the gap between their culture and his own. And so he took to YouTube.

Asfand and his friends from mosque decided to make a series of satirical videos. They had to find something entertaining to do over the summer.

In one video, “Going Gorillas!,” one of the guys dresses up in a gorilla suit and visits local grocery stores, purchasing bananas. The video has over 31,000 views.

“Box-ing!” shows the friends with cardboard boxes on their heads, running around local malls and a Target store. It has almost 22,000 views.

Asfand and his friends’ most popular YouTube video was “Indian Dance Troll.” In the video, the group played the popular Indian song “Tunuk Tunuk Tan” over stereo speakers and danced around stunned crowds at local malls. They recorded every reaction on camera. As of press time, the video has just over 60,000 views.

“Everybody at school was talking about it,” Asfand recalls. He quickly became known as “the funny guy” at Etiwanda High School in Rancho Cucamonga, a city about 40 miles east of Los Angeles.

But “Indian Dance Troll” was Asfand’s last YouTube video. Despite all of the humor and popularity that the video brought to Asfand’s life, he never completely let his guard down around his classmates. Memories of classmates bullying him haunted Asfand.

He remembers, “Al-Queda, Saddam Hussein, terrorism… I got a lot of that. Living here, I got so much of that growing up.”  

There’s no way for Asfand to change how people treat him or fellow Muslims, but he now understands that he can change how he views himself. He continues to make peace with his tormented past by attending mosque and devoting himself to his family, friends, school, and extracurricular activities, like his internship at a medical firm in neighboring city Upland.

Asfand no longer has to worry about people bothering him because of who he is, and he knows that he will also never unfairly judge others too.

Asfand says, “You can be the weirdest, quietest person or the loudest jock at our school – I make friends no matter who you are.”