After a year of traveling overseas, being back in the States was a relief. The weather didn’t scorch my skin and the air didn’t smell like burning garbage and diesel. It was the first time seeing so much green and it almost hurt my eyes.
But what I missed the most was the diversity of the United States of America, where crowds are filled with people from different nationalities and backgrounds. However, it’s not the same everywhere.
In Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, for the most part, if you were an immigrant from West Africa you would stay with other immigrants, and if you were an Arab you would stay with the Arabs.
If you were a Yemeni Arab you would stay with other Yemenis. If you were a Pakistani or Afghan the same applied. So this put me and my family in a strange place, as I’m biracial.
My father is white and of British descent and my mother is Bengali. In Jeddah, I could blend in with my dark hair and tan skin. I could easily be overlooked as a local. However, for my father, it was a bit harder because people would mistake him for a light-skinned Pakistani or Afghan.
Whenever we walked down the street it would look strange to the locals. “Why is an Arab kid with a Pakistani man?” Was probably the question going through their heads.
While living in Saudi Arabia my father and I decided to take a night out. We were bored sitting in the house so we decided to go to a patch of sand in an abandoned garden a couple of blocks away from our house, make some tea and try out a new tent we bought.
As the sun set, we could hear the call to prayer from the nearby mosques for the Maghrib, or sunset prayer. As we got ready to pray a police officer came to us with his pistol in his grip and walked toward us cautiously. We were then put in the back of his car.
My father, who spoke Arabic, was able to understand what they were saying amongst each other. From what he could understand, it seemed the police were confused about why a fourteen-year-old Arab was with a Pakistani man. It was hard for them to fathom that a biracial child who looked like an Arab was American, and was with an older American.
After hours of being in the police station, we were eventually taken back to the place of arrest and questioned by the police chief as to why we were there. Eventually, since we weren’t doing anything wrong we were released. However, this experience taught me that mixing of cultures, which I saw as normal in the States, wasn’t normal in other countries.
Once I returned to America in 2014 with this experience in my memory I realized that America’s diversity is our strength. America’s history of accepting immigrants and people of different backgrounds is what made us unique. We do indeed have something in America that not many other countries may have and that is diversity.
This is the way I viewed America until the 2016 elections.
Fortunately, here at Mercer, the campus is very diverse. In my classes, I have fellow students from Barbados, West Africa, the Dominican Republic, Israel and so many other countries.
If you were to look around in your classes you will find someone from somewhere. But the diversity in America and here at Mercer needs to be acknowledged and protected because those students from different countries may not feel welcomed or at home.
However, with the election of Donald Trump, there was a wave of open racism and hate I couldn’t believe even existed in the U.S.
I remember going onto social media sites like Facebook and seeing people commenting under the videos of Trump spewing his dislike of Islam and Muslims. The comments would say things like “Let’s just kill them all” or “If they like sharia law so much they should go back to Saudi Arabia.”
The scary part about this is that if you went onto the profiles of these commentators they looked and acted like your everyday citizens: grandmothers, firefighters, and teachers. It seemed like the people I identified with as fellow Americans had isolated and abandoned me.
Sometimes when I’m working at my family’s cafe I tend to have a good discussion with my customers. Eventually, they ask me my name. When I reply with “Mohammad,” what sometimes follows are looks of confusion or suspicion. Sometimes the discussion presses on into a spiral of uncomfortable questions.
Some that are clearly based off the words of the president. According to an article last year by Jenna Johnson and Abigail Hauslohner for the Washington Post, President Trump is quoted as saying, “I think Islam hates us. There’s something there that — there’s a tremendous hatred there. There’s a tremendous hatred. We have to get to the bottom of it. There’s an unbelievable hatred of us.”
This correlates with the questions I get from other people. Once I was asked, “What is Islam’s stance on America?” Another time someone asked me, “Are Muslim women allowed to speak in public?”
These questions shine light on the division and suspicion raised by the president. Also, those types of questions push that feeling of isolation deeper.
What separates us from the rest of the world is our history of multiculturalism. Now as a college student with these experiences I want others at college to also see this perceptive and act on it.
Here at MCCC, the diversity is prevalent. We have students from all different backgrounds and ethnicities, so let’s make this integration remain the norm even if the current president makes negative remarks about our fellow students who are Muslims or immigrants.
This article is the third in a three-part series. Click here to read “Mexican in the age of Trump” or here to read “Russian in the Age of Trump”
