Letter:

To Theo,

I’ve always had trouble answering the “diversity question” on each of my college applications. I know that college is still a while off for you and you probably haven’t started thinking about high school yet, yet alone that. But I wanted to help you figure out the strange emotions that may come up when you have to answer it for yourself. 

Mom always told me to check the “American Indian or Alaskan Native” box and I have; it’s not like I’m lying, because she is Arawak. (You know, like the natives that Christopher Columbus first, uh, encountered?) It doesn’t feel as if we are though, and when you have our last name? Sheesh. People would not shut up about how I gamed the system. Dad told me how it was a good sign that one of the colleges I had applied to reached back to me wanting to know more about my “Native American/Native Hawaiian/Alaskan Native background”, and it felt… weird. Weird because this was something that was true on only this electronic application and nowhere else. No one saw me and thought: “Yeah, he’s Native American.” I know I didn’t think that way about myself. I wasn’t sure what to think, so I always let other people think for me.   

And Dad? I couldn’t tell you the whole story of how we arrived from India because it happened a century ago, and I’m not sure if any of us know the story. Sometimes it feels like that page in the history book has been torn out. But we did end up in the Carribean somehow, and God I felt weird checking off African American even though Caribbean kind of implies “black”, but it felt like I was claiming to be part of an experience I had no right to claim. So I didn’t. If you feel comfortable making that choice when you are older, I understand. Truth be told I’m not comfortable with the choice I made, because I was forced to make it. Leaving that question blank seemed worse both for my college acceptance chances and letting others make their choice on what my identity was. 

And I always felt out of place because everyone who saw me as different saw me in the same way that most people did, and I was afraid that the people who saw me as the same would realize that I wasn’t. I saw myself as different; they gave me a reason to feel different, through their questions about my name and where I was really from and how I couldn’t eat beef, no wait pork, right? I hope you don’t have to deal with more than that, because I know it can get much worse than that. But I also couldn’t relate to the stories of life back home, because I was so far removed from that space. So we are part of no group but yet all of them.

People will think whatever they want to think about us. Trust me, I know. I really hope that I can help because I’ve been through it without the words of a sibling guiding me.

I still have applications to work on, and I will still have to deal with this question in the future. I hope that my time pining over this seemingly small question will help you. It is a question that has not escaped me, and one I think will hang over me for a long time.    

Shamaul

Lecture:

Islamophobia is a misleading term. It does not capture the entire picture, as the implication is that it is connected to the aforementioned religion. But many people have conflated the religion with the skin color. Anything that seems religious that a brown person is wearing is seen as Islamic. Any foreign food, any difficult name, any belief that we keep with us is seen as an attempt to undermine American democracy. You may think I am being extreme, but perhaps you don’t remember the birther controversy, or the travel ban that President Trump enacted just 3 years ago.

It has, at the very least, stayed alive through the current administration, through tweets that claims Muslim communities cheered the downing of the Twin Towers, and that representatives who wear Muslim headdress are a danger to America. This divisive rhetoric alienates people who have done nothing wrong, because they are seen the same as enemies of the U.S government, protectors of freedom, democracy, and everything right with the world.

This idea of feeling otherized isn’t specific to brown-presenting people, but we have dealt with many antagonistic feelings due to the events of the last twenty years, including but not limited to terrorism attacks, American intervention in the Middle East, and anti-immigration sentiment. Note that I say presenting: Many times these choices aren’t made by the people around them. It matters less about what you think about yourself and more about what people think about you, and people like me can only do so much to change the minds of others. 

To prove my point further, even I do not feel as if I should belong to this group I associate with. I come from a small Caribbean nation called Guyana, which brought indentured servants from India under British colonialism over a hundred years ago. My disconnect with what many people consider my history is a century wide, and yet it does not matter. I must be Islamic.  

We have always been considered outsiders in a country that is meant to be built from people all over the world. An outside should not exist, because otherwise we become a country that is not welcome to everyone who wants to be a part of it. We must do better. Otherwise we cannot claim to stand for those ideals we are so proud to call our own.   

Process Notes:

Something that I noticed immediately when constructing these two pieces was how different my audience was and how I needed to use the right language when addressing them. In my lecture, it felt as if I had to explain the problem to someone else, whereas my letter had the premise that this was a problem that I have encountered that will continue in the future. That simple premise was the difference between being vulnerable and trying to convince others about the severity of the problem. The difference between the two uses of the word “we” is striking to me. I found myself toning down a lot of my expressions in the lecture, as if I had to justify everything I said, and not take it for granted.