In 1904, a Congolese man, Ota Benga, arrived in the US. He did not arrive with a student visa nor did he intend to marry a citizen to receive his green card once he landed. He was bought by merchants to perform the paltry work of being an exhibit at the Bronx Zoo and soon met his co-worker, a chimpanzee. After an initial outcry by the black community, The New York Times, in a very well-worded defence, encouraged the continuation of the exhibit of Benga. In 1916, after being unable to return to his tribe, Benga built a fire. He then took a gun, aimed it at his heart and pulled the trigger. End of life!In 2008, a man named Fate Vincent Winslow was sentenced to life in prison by a jury. For what you may ask. He sold $ 20 worth of marijuana. Shocked? There is more: 65 percent of inmates sentenced to life in prison for non-violent crimes are black, in a country with a 13 percent black population.In 2015, a woman was denied a can of soda on an airplane, presumably due to the fact that she was a Muslim wearing a hijab. The victim posted her ordeal on a social media site. The post went viral. The act in and of itself is disgusting and action should be taken on a corporate level by the airline to solve the issue. What is even more frightening is the courage of minority groups in the US to bring together a multitude of unrelated incidents fueled by the hate of individuals and put them under the banner of institutional racism, especially in light of what blacks in the US face. Again, it is 2015 and another video has gone viral with a (now former) police corporal slamming a bikini-clad teenage girl to the ground in McKinney, which sparked allegations of racism.That is one side of the picture of the US. What is the other side?Income statistics paint a vivid picture of minority power in the US. Pakistani-US households have a median income of $ 63,000, significantly higher than the median of the general population, which is $ 51,939. Iranian-Americans make even more at $ 68,000 and the general Arab-American community has a median income of $ 56,500. Black families in the US have a household income of $ 39,715, less than the average, and considerably less than the income of Muslims in the US.Institutional racism and discrimination exist when a whole people are subjugated to another, based solely on their beliefs or how they look. The subordination of a less powerful people by a more powerful people can be called racism. Muslims in the US are not in a place to say that they are victims of institutional racism. They are simply not. If Muslims were earning less, not getting educated, not being given social services or not allowed to practice their religion, as some minorities are in Pakistan, then they might have some ground on which to claim that the country they came to because their homeland did not offer them opportunity is being racist.Passing remarks and isolated incidents of racial hatred by poor, conservative white people is not a basis to raise the victim flag when you are earning more than the general population, own more businesses on a per capita basis and have higher education rates than the rest of the country. You are simply complaining.You could go as far to say that Muslims in the US are being racist. In my life, being raised in the US, I have not had any opportunity limited to me because I am Muslim. I have, however, seen with my own eyes Pakistanis and Arabs not offering jobs to blacks simply based on the colour of their skin.Pakistanis, Arabs and the general Muslim population all reached the US and, because of the opportunity and open market allowed to immigrants, have been able to reach the upper echelons of US society. Muslim ethnic minorities make up significantly powerful groups in the US. They are not victims of a powerful institution working against them; they are in fact a part of the institution that oppresses black-Americans. Instead of nagging about incidents, they should look in the mirror and understand how their own actions perpetuate US racism. And they should fix it. The writer is an entrepreneur from Bahawalpur and Baltimore