Islamophobia: irrational fear of, aversion to, or discrimination against Islam or people who practice Islam

First known use of Islamophobia: 1923, in the meaning defined above

Your word is Islamophobia.

Can I have the definition of the word?

Islamophobia is— 

Dad told me I should never run for public office. 

While Mom cooked dinner, he was always watching CNN in the living room. Someone was always yelling, someone was always getting criticized, and sometimes the name Hussein was thrown around with vitriol. He told me that he didn’t know if I could take it.

They both told me I couldn’t be like them; that I had to be something more, someone who could make a life for himself, someone who could do something with my life.  

But they told me of course you and him were at the top of the class. Of course I wanted to go to that high school. Of course–

Dad finally converted and got baptized last year.

He never seemed to pay attention to Father during mass, so I didn’t think I needed to either; I just stared at the missal in front of me and pretended to be interested in the texts for next week. I just needed to get through the next 2 hours–

I told my mom that I wanted to bring Lunchables to school instead of the food that she cooked. 

I got so caught up in how they were making weird faces and said that my food stank and I spent the whole rest of the day trying to figure out if my collar still had curry on it or if my shirt still smelled. 

I don’t know why we watched so many Bollywood movies; it wasn’t like we were really from there. Nothing comes from where I’m from. And everyone thinks they know where I’m from. Of course it all made sense to them.

Of course I could win this spelling bee.

I-S-L-A-M-O-P-H-O-B-I-A.

That is correct.

Process notes:

This ended up being more about me than I initially anticipated, which was honestly not the direction that I intended to go with this piece, but I felt like it helped bring everything together in my mind. It also made this super personal and at times felt impossible to finish. I was really happy with how I framed the piece (another implicit of course thrown in there). I had fragments of thoughts that I knew I needed to throw in,and wanted to make it feel like a stream of consciousness, so I needed a nice way connecting all these discrete thoughts together, and feel much more satisfied than I initially anticipated I would be. I don’t know if there exists a space for the voice I was representing just because it is unique to the past 20 years or so and it feels really weird that the voice I end up speaking from is mostly my own, but hopefully enough innocence was conveyed in order to capture the voice of someone who doesn’t quite understand everything that has happened to him yet.