Story highlights In the last two weeks, there have been four violent attacks on Indian-American men

Sayu Bhojwani: This kind of discrimination isn't new, but combating it will require minority communities to join forces

Sayu Bhojwani served as New York's first commissioner of immigrant affairs and is the founder of South Asian Youth Action, a community-based organization in Queens. Since 2010, she has served as founder and president of The New American Leaders Project, which is based in New York. The views expressed in this commentary are her own.

(CNN) Two weeks, four attacks, two fatal. Violent incidents in Kansas, Washington, South Carolina and Florida have one thing in common. The victims, Srinivas Kuchibhotla, Deep Rai, Harnish Patel and the owner of a Met Mart store in Port St. Lucie, Florida, were all Indian-American men.

Understandably, the Indian-American community is now in a state of mourning. As we heal, I hope we will learn the greater lesson necessary to respond to future attacks: that we can't fight bigotry alone. We must form long-term alliances with other minority groups and find strength in organized collective action.

Sayu Bhojwani

For Indian-Americans, this is an opportunity to emerge from a myth of racial ambiguity to a reality of historical racism.

The spate of violence in 2017 is rightfully linked to the hateful rhetoric and racist policy that the Trump administration has been accused of perpetuating. But it is neither the first nor last cycle of hate crimes against Indian-Americans in this country. Since I moved to the United States in 1984, there have been at least three periods in which hate crimes against the community spiked. First in the late 1980s in Jersey City, New Jersey , and then across the nation during both Iraq Wars and after the September 11 , 2001, attacks.

What makes the hate crimes in 2017 different? America today is no longer a beacon of hope and opportunity for immigrants, and the current administration has helped create an environment for this kind of hostility to take hold.