This is what a West Virginia TV station found when it asked Muslims how they’re treated

Over the past two weeks, you've met three Muslim West Virginians who've talked about how a lot of people group them in with everything they've ever heard about their religion or ethnicity. One woman mentioned how her hijab makes her feel like she's reflecting an entire faith. The two men you heard from said they've been bullied and called terrorists. Now, 5 News diving deeper into how projecting ideas about an entire group of people onto one person has been a pattern throughout history. There's that saying that you have to step back for a moment to see the bigger picture because we can't see what's right under our noses. But we can look at history.

There's that other saying that history often repeats itself. Dr. Katherine Aaslestad, a German and European History Professor at West Virginia University knows of some examples of this. We start this story here in the U.S. right after World War II. The comparison to anti-German sentiment then and what the people you heard from have said about being Muslim now have a lot of similarities.

"In World War II there was also a tremendous amount of anti-German hostility with the assumption that all Germans are Nazis or all Germans will be loyal to their old fatherland or old motherland and not to the United States," said Aaslestad. "German books were burned. So there's this kind of view that everything about this culture is somehow toxic."