I am a 6 foot 1 inch tall brown-haired, green-eyed, white American male who COULD have actually had it all.
Unfortunately, most of the goodies were out of stock by the time my light-skinned gene pool finally moseyed up to the white privilege line. As if ending up Muslim wasn’t torment enough, God threw in the final curve ball by sticking me to be raised in the United States by not one, but two immigrant parents.
So just as we’ve come to accept the unavoidable existence of fake news, I now present “fake white people” and specifically: me. Fake white people enjoy all the perks of white privilege --except for the privilege.
Like jalapeño cream cheese on store-brand saltines, my fake-white childhood was spread across Utah, Indiana, and New Jersey. It was all pretty fun and typical --except for all those times that people ended up knowing my name, ethnic background, religion, or so help me God, my parents. Whoa, and the FOB-meter goes berserk. Nope, I wasn’t lucky enough to have a set of those “tired, poor, huddled” FOB parents who speak zero English and are so fear-stricken from the old country that they barely speak at all.
Nope, those models were sold out back in the early 70's.
The pair I ended up with was missing the standard-issue override feature, rendering their “yearning to breathe free” circuitry amuck. And amuck ran both of my parental units: with barely one foot off the plane as the other hit the ground running to complete their US college degrees -- Pharmacy and PhD in Economics to be specific. Walk into any store with my dad and there’s a third-world-election result of 99.8% chance you will hear his infamous command, “let me speak to your supervisor!” Because you just can't feel it in print, here’s a literal translation of my father’s iconic decree: Go and return with a more intelligent life form whose communication skills commensurate with my PhD and my proficiency in two languages, and also remember that I taught college students who were way smarter than you.
On the up side, I will halal-bet you a made-in-America fake-shawarma sandwich that there exists no adult male who can hand write numbers as pristine as I can. As the oldest son of an immigrant CPA who ALSO held a US-issued PhD in Economics, my Baba would actually erase my entire math homework if the numbers did not, as he would say, "look like a typewriter". And that included the extra pages of math he assigned no matter how many A's in math I brought home. Do YOU even know that the entire reason " = " is the symbol that means equal is because BOTH lines are EXACTLY the same length and also the exact SAME distance from each other? WELL I freakin’ DID, because mine had to pass the CPA-PhD math police. You know the cliche about how immigrant families are more driven? Good, because I seriously DID NOT even know such a notion existed until well into my 30's. The upside is that I'm still alive, because thanks to the look on my dad’s face, I froze mid-sentence the one time I tried to ask, "but why do I have to do all this extra math even though no one else in my class does?"
To my pharmacist mother's credit, I'm pretty sure I was the only kid in North America who didn't know the word Tylenol but said acetaminophen like it was a normal human word. Like our home was some scientific lab, my Mama made sure every bottle containing any medicine or substance of any kind was fully labelled. Our household medicine cabinet was Mama-pharmacist-bear's holy altar. Since we were the last people in the nation to get colored TV, our medicine cabinet’s periodic inspections created great entertainment value when my parents’ college degrees clashed: "I don't mess with all your number business, so unless your PhD is now in pharmacy, I'm still the only pharmacist in this house".
You'd understand those moments better if you knew how insanely more endowed with patience my mother was. That patience also meant that she invested more time refining her quasi-British-Arab-American accent, and thus generally spoke slower and more clearly. My mom's noble accent was good enough not only to graduate from the University of Utah and become a licensed Pharmacist, but also good enough for her regular speaking engagements as a community activist and youth mentor. So when the drug store schmuck of a clerk made her repeat “in which isle is the rubbing alcohol” a few too many times, my Mama in her signature hijab headscarf and robe marched up to the pharmacist and DREW the molecular structure for C3H80. He walked her to isle three. I’m pretty sure THAT pharmacist is actually the only in his entire profession to have a customer, an undercover fellow pharmacist, administer an impromptu organic chemistry test.
And yet in 1976, during the apartment fire which killed my younger brother, my mother had to re-dial for emergency assistance because the first operator hung up on her. The Indianapolis operator who hung up on my mother did so because her accent did not make the cut to give a rip. My mother’s immigrant accent did not entitle her to also be frantic and terrified while our apartment burned around her and my 5 year old brother, my 6 year old cousin, and my cousin's mother. God help us had the operator actually known that this caller was not only an immigrant, but also both Arab and Muslim, albeit the hijab head-covering kind of Muslim.
Side note for yalls younger readers: Dialing 911 for emergencies did not exist back then. Instead, you just dialed zero and the told the operator your emergency, and the operator would connect the call directly to your local fire department or PD. The 1967 Federal Commission establishing today's nation-wide 911 service was implemented in Indianapolis starting 1977.With both her hands burned by this point, my mother re-dialed that phone and finally "qualified" to have fire engines dispatched –as her son died.
My 6 year old cousin’s life became a series of reconstructive skin surgeries while mother remains as you read this in a slightly-better-than-vegetative state. AND yet to fully appreciate the unique brand of salt rubbed into THAT wound, I need you to also know that this 6 year old girl’s father was and still is an ER physician who day-in and day-out saves the pathetic lives of the same immigrant-hating-racists who hang up on frantic immigrant moms.
Grief stricken paranoid immigrants’ search for blame?
After the fire, we moved into another apartment in the same complex, where our neighbors made sure my family’s wounds stayed raw. Eggs and tomatoes were the regulars, but any food-of-the day was enlisted to continuously identify our front door as their public shrine to Islamophobia. The audio for our door's visual display was the ongoing "knock and run" pranks. By then, I was tall enough to see through the peep hole, my family's security system and our only filter to identify if hate or non-hate was on the other side of that 1 and 3/4 inches of wood.
We finally moved from that apartment complex a year later –to what is likely the only American town whose entire 10,000 WASP population were all inbred with that exact same accent-hating operator for whom our lives had no value on this side of the golden door.
You guessed it, our new hometown of Plainfield IN had to work twice as hard to one-up the death and disfigurement their Indianapolis rival had already doled out to my family. And busy bees indeed them there WASPs sure were.
I had never seen a camel in my life, and it was in Plainfield that I learned the word CAMEL-JOCKEY. I didn't even know what jockey meant. As it turns out, the combination of camel-jockey with “I-ranian” are best served up with a main course of daily punches to my stomach at the bus stop a block from our home. This was the bus stop my sister and I had to walk twice as far to, unlike all the kids around us who were granted the short-cut safe passage through the neighbors’ yards. As if juggling English and Arabic wasn't enough, as 10- and 11-year-olds, we had to also learn that when a rifle is pointed at you, that's actually hick for, "damn foreigner, stay off my property and go back where you came from". Some days, they graced us with the translation first and other days it came after the rifle. Paranoid 10 year old?
Okay back to the bus stop beatings. Like pretty much everyone else around me, Mel and Massey were bigger than this scrawny 5th grader --of course because by now we’ve already established that even white immigrants aren’t entitled to a fair fight. “Are we Iranian, Mama?” I would cry to the woman whose phone call to save her 5 year old was terminated by the same stock of moron-wrapped-in-idiot sub-humans. It was also that same familiar humanoid concoction in police uniform who would pull over my mother just to ask her why she’s wearing THAT on her head. The town’s less civil high schoolers used to simply cut to the chase and yank off my older sister’s Islamic hijab headscarf. Getting help from teachers, counselors, school administrators or the local PD is a long shot when they’re all cut from the same Muslim-hating mold.
My being called Iranian however, was its own unique hot mess whose strength drew the fear-fest-de-jour, the 444 day Iranian hostage crisis. So while I was only one of two in my class who literally scored 100% on the capital of every state in the nation AND every country on the globe – “Iranian” was the only “bad place” label my geographically impaired bus stop classmate schmucks could conjure up. The messy part started when the word GUERRILLA became the media’s label-of-choice for those naughty Iranians. Like it was yesterday, I recall how my mother actually took the time to explain to me that I wasn’t being called a big harry monkey (gorilla), I was basically being called a terrorist. Dear young folks: the T-word simply hadn’t yet surfaced way back then. To be fair, the mix up is totally legit because based on the limited sample size of actual Iranians in Plainfield… this scared school boy actually found them brothas a tad scary even if it was because of their overly-endowed body hair. Today, this 49 year old still holding out for puberty to finish filling in my beard wouldn’t mind a few of those hair chromosomes. But hey, that’s what happens when you’re late in line.
Side note: Free tip for any non-real-white person considering life inside an actual WASP armpit. First make sure our government is not actively screwing any country within 1000 miles of your own home country. The 1000 radius accommodates the required buffer for your new neighbors' ignorance of geography. Yup, all yours, and I did say free, so tell your friends -- I’m here all week.
Okay, so let's time-lapse out to just after the Y2K nuttiness settled down, in sunny multi-cultural southern California roughly 4 miles from the happiest place on earth.
1. Cracker jack
2. Carrot top
3. Are you going to kill me?
In order of my three boys’ ages, those are the names they got to be called. What’s different this round, is that each of those buggers owned up on their own, and in their own way. And their fake-white papa couldn’t be prouder. My oldest, cracker jack, was truly the palest, whitest of all the 9 boys in his 6-8th grade class. Each of the 9 boys had an endearing derogatory nickname, ranging from my colorless chromosomal contribution all the way through to his darkest buddy whose nickname was --yeah, no way, I’m sticking to the ground rules that only black people are allowed to drop n-bombs. The point is that there were no racist stomach-punching academically inferior life forms that outed this group’s ethnicities – in their own self-entitled, brazenly immature yet age-appropriate way; every shade of God's beauty was proudly owned and celebrated.
Carrot top, my second of three boys, is our family’s lovingly anointed Irish Muslim --I know, poor thing right? Middle child AND red hair –I should have started crowd-sourcing for his therapy years ago. Much like camel-jokey, my first introduction to “carrot top” was in learning that this is how my middle son was publicly addressed by his African-American kindergarten teacher. Her name-calling magically stopped the very same day he replied back, “yes, Ms. Blacktop”. Yeah and because I know you’re thinking it: even though that is so totally something we’d actually tell our kids to do (okay judge me, whatever, bite me) I swear that neither his mother nor I set him up to say that! ‘Nuff said.
My final contribution in support of an upgraded global gene pool, our slickest-tongued of them all had just finished explaining to his 9-year old peers, that he’s Muslim and that both his grandparents are from Syria though his own parents never lived in Syria. Being simply himself, my son worded it this way because it reflected how he experienced his own personal household culture as far more American than Arab. He saw Syria as what more precisely identifies where his ancestry is from versus Arab, which refers to 21 other countries he doesn’t relate to. Arabic on the other hand is actually a language, albeit one that he struggles to read, write, or understand. Oh, and he’s also no stranger to the fact that Arab is synonymous with “bomb”.
Side note that at the time we lived in what is the largest Vietnamese population outside of Vietnam (Little Saigon) –which means more than half the school is Vietnamese, at least a quarter Mexican, and roughly a quarter Muslim of various ethnicities. There were literally like 7 “real” white kids in the entire school. One more thing about where we lived at the time: in the heart of one of the largest US Muslim populations AND walking distance from one of Orange County’s 5 mega-mosques, not even counting the creeping sharia smaller ones.
Unfortunately, most of the goodies were out of stock by the time my light-skinned gene pool finally moseyed up to the white privilege line. As if ending up Muslim wasn’t torment enough, God threw in the final curve ball by sticking me to be raised in the United States by not one, but two immigrant parents.
So just as we’ve come to accept the unavoidable existence of fake news, I now present “fake white people” and specifically: me. Fake white people enjoy all the perks of white privilege --except for the privilege.
Like jalapeño cream cheese on store-brand saltines, my fake-white childhood was spread across Utah, Indiana, and New Jersey. It was all pretty fun and typical --except for all those times that people ended up knowing my name, ethnic background, religion, or so help me God, my parents. Whoa, and the FOB-meter goes berserk. Nope, I wasn’t lucky enough to have a set of those “tired, poor, huddled” FOB parents who speak zero English and are so fear-stricken from the old country that they barely speak at all.
Nope, those models were sold out back in the early 70's.
On the up side, I will halal-bet you a made-in-America fake-shawarma sandwich that there exists no adult male who can hand write numbers as pristine as I can. As the oldest son of an immigrant CPA who ALSO held a US-issued PhD in Economics, my Baba would actually erase my entire math homework if the numbers did not, as he would say, "look like a typewriter". And that included the extra pages of math he assigned no matter how many A's in math I brought home. Do YOU even know that the entire reason " = " is the symbol that means equal is because BOTH lines are EXACTLY the same length and also the exact SAME distance from each other? WELL I freakin’ DID, because mine had to pass the CPA-PhD math police. You know the cliche about how immigrant families are more driven? Good, because I seriously DID NOT even know such a notion existed until well into my 30's. The upside is that I'm still alive, because thanks to the look on my dad’s face, I froze mid-sentence the one time I tried to ask, "but why do I have to do all this extra math even though no one else in my class does?"
To my pharmacist mother's credit, I'm pretty sure I was the only kid in North America who didn't know the word Tylenol but said acetaminophen like it was a normal human word. Like our home was some scientific lab, my Mama made sure every bottle containing any medicine or substance of any kind was fully labelled. Our household medicine cabinet was Mama-pharmacist-bear's holy altar. Since we were the last people in the nation to get colored TV, our medicine cabinet’s periodic inspections created great entertainment value when my parents’ college degrees clashed: "I don't mess with all your number business, so unless your PhD is now in pharmacy, I'm still the only pharmacist in this house".
You'd understand those moments better if you knew how insanely more endowed with patience my mother was. That patience also meant that she invested more time refining her quasi-British-Arab-American accent, and thus generally spoke slower and more clearly. My mom's noble accent was good enough not only to graduate from the University of Utah and become a licensed Pharmacist, but also good enough for her regular speaking engagements as a community activist and youth mentor. So when the drug store schmuck of a clerk made her repeat “in which isle is the rubbing alcohol” a few too many times, my Mama in her signature hijab headscarf and robe marched up to the pharmacist and DREW the molecular structure for C3H80. He walked her to isle three. I’m pretty sure THAT pharmacist is actually the only in his entire profession to have a customer, an undercover fellow pharmacist, administer an impromptu organic chemistry test.
And yet in 1976, during the apartment fire which killed my younger brother, my mother had to re-dial for emergency assistance because the first operator hung up on her. The Indianapolis operator who hung up on my mother did so because her accent did not make the cut to give a rip. My mother’s immigrant accent did not entitle her to also be frantic and terrified while our apartment burned around her and my 5 year old brother, my 6 year old cousin, and my cousin's mother. God help us had the operator actually known that this caller was not only an immigrant, but also both Arab and Muslim, albeit the hijab head-covering kind of Muslim.
Side note for yalls younger readers: Dialing 911 for emergencies did not exist back then. Instead, you just dialed zero and the told the operator your emergency, and the operator would connect the call directly to your local fire department or PD. The 1967 Federal Commission establishing today's nation-wide 911 service was implemented in Indianapolis starting 1977.With both her hands burned by this point, my mother re-dialed that phone and finally "qualified" to have fire engines dispatched –as her son died.
My 6 year old cousin’s life became a series of reconstructive skin surgeries while mother remains as you read this in a slightly-better-than-vegetative state. AND yet to fully appreciate the unique brand of salt rubbed into THAT wound, I need you to also know that this 6 year old girl’s father was and still is an ER physician who day-in and day-out saves the pathetic lives of the same immigrant-hating-racists who hang up on frantic immigrant moms.
Grief stricken paranoid immigrants’ search for blame?
After the fire, we moved into another apartment in the same complex, where our neighbors made sure my family’s wounds stayed raw. Eggs and tomatoes were the regulars, but any food-of-the day was enlisted to continuously identify our front door as their public shrine to Islamophobia. The audio for our door's visual display was the ongoing "knock and run" pranks. By then, I was tall enough to see through the peep hole, my family's security system and our only filter to identify if hate or non-hate was on the other side of that 1 and 3/4 inches of wood.
We finally moved from that apartment complex a year later –to what is likely the only American town whose entire 10,000 WASP population were all inbred with that exact same accent-hating operator for whom our lives had no value on this side of the golden door.
You guessed it, our new hometown of Plainfield IN had to work twice as hard to one-up the death and disfigurement their Indianapolis rival had already doled out to my family. And busy bees indeed them there WASPs sure were.
I had never seen a camel in my life, and it was in Plainfield that I learned the word CAMEL-JOCKEY. I didn't even know what jockey meant. As it turns out, the combination of camel-jockey with “I-ranian” are best served up with a main course of daily punches to my stomach at the bus stop a block from our home. This was the bus stop my sister and I had to walk twice as far to, unlike all the kids around us who were granted the short-cut safe passage through the neighbors’ yards. As if juggling English and Arabic wasn't enough, as 10- and 11-year-olds, we had to also learn that when a rifle is pointed at you, that's actually hick for, "damn foreigner, stay off my property and go back where you came from". Some days, they graced us with the translation first and other days it came after the rifle. Paranoid 10 year old?
Okay back to the bus stop beatings. Like pretty much everyone else around me, Mel and Massey were bigger than this scrawny 5th grader --of course because by now we’ve already established that even white immigrants aren’t entitled to a fair fight. “Are we Iranian, Mama?” I would cry to the woman whose phone call to save her 5 year old was terminated by the same stock of moron-wrapped-in-idiot sub-humans. It was also that same familiar humanoid concoction in police uniform who would pull over my mother just to ask her why she’s wearing THAT on her head. The town’s less civil high schoolers used to simply cut to the chase and yank off my older sister’s Islamic hijab headscarf. Getting help from teachers, counselors, school administrators or the local PD is a long shot when they’re all cut from the same Muslim-hating mold.
My being called Iranian however, was its own unique hot mess whose strength drew the fear-fest-de-jour, the 444 day Iranian hostage crisis. So while I was only one of two in my class who literally scored 100% on the capital of every state in the nation AND every country on the globe – “Iranian” was the only “bad place” label my geographically impaired bus stop classmate schmucks could conjure up. The messy part started when the word GUERRILLA became the media’s label-of-choice for those naughty Iranians. Like it was yesterday, I recall how my mother actually took the time to explain to me that I wasn’t being called a big harry monkey (gorilla), I was basically being called a terrorist. Dear young folks: the T-word simply hadn’t yet surfaced way back then. To be fair, the mix up is totally legit because based on the limited sample size of actual Iranians in Plainfield… this scared school boy actually found them brothas a tad scary even if it was because of their overly-endowed body hair. Today, this 49 year old still holding out for puberty to finish filling in my beard wouldn’t mind a few of those hair chromosomes. But hey, that’s what happens when you’re late in line.
Side note: Free tip for any non-real-white person considering life inside an actual WASP armpit. First make sure our government is not actively screwing any country within 1000 miles of your own home country. The 1000 radius accommodates the required buffer for your new neighbors' ignorance of geography. Yup, all yours, and I did say free, so tell your friends -- I’m here all week.
Okay, so let's time-lapse out to just after the Y2K nuttiness settled down, in sunny multi-cultural southern California roughly 4 miles from the happiest place on earth.
1. Cracker jack
2. Carrot top
3. Are you going to kill me?
In order of my three boys’ ages, those are the names they got to be called. What’s different this round, is that each of those buggers owned up on their own, and in their own way. And their fake-white papa couldn’t be prouder. My oldest, cracker jack, was truly the palest, whitest of all the 9 boys in his 6-8th grade class. Each of the 9 boys had an endearing derogatory nickname, ranging from my colorless chromosomal contribution all the way through to his darkest buddy whose nickname was --yeah, no way, I’m sticking to the ground rules that only black people are allowed to drop n-bombs. The point is that there were no racist stomach-punching academically inferior life forms that outed this group’s ethnicities – in their own self-entitled, brazenly immature yet age-appropriate way; every shade of God's beauty was proudly owned and celebrated.
Carrot top, my second of three boys, is our family’s lovingly anointed Irish Muslim --I know, poor thing right? Middle child AND red hair –I should have started crowd-sourcing for his therapy years ago. Much like camel-jokey, my first introduction to “carrot top” was in learning that this is how my middle son was publicly addressed by his African-American kindergarten teacher. Her name-calling magically stopped the very same day he replied back, “yes, Ms. Blacktop”. Yeah and because I know you’re thinking it: even though that is so totally something we’d actually tell our kids to do (okay judge me, whatever, bite me) I swear that neither his mother nor I set him up to say that! ‘Nuff said.
My final contribution in support of an upgraded global gene pool, our slickest-tongued of them all had just finished explaining to his 9-year old peers, that he’s Muslim and that both his grandparents are from Syria though his own parents never lived in Syria. Being simply himself, my son worded it this way because it reflected how he experienced his own personal household culture as far more American than Arab. He saw Syria as what more precisely identifies where his ancestry is from versus Arab, which refers to 21 other countries he doesn’t relate to. Arabic on the other hand is actually a language, albeit one that he struggles to read, write, or understand. Oh, and he’s also no stranger to the fact that Arab is synonymous with “bomb”.
Side note that at the time we lived in what is the largest Vietnamese population outside of Vietnam (Little Saigon) –which means more than half the school is Vietnamese, at least a quarter Mexican, and roughly a quarter Muslim of various ethnicities. There were literally like 7 “real” white kids in the entire school. One more thing about where we lived at the time: in the heart of one of the largest US Muslim populations AND walking distance from one of Orange County’s 5 mega-mosques, not even counting the creeping sharia smaller ones.
Vietnamese classmate to my son: so you're Arab?
Response: so you're Chinese?
Mexican classmate to my son: so you're Arabic?
Response: so you're Spanish?
Third classmate overhearing their conversation asks: Syria? So are you ISIS?
Response: so you're Chinese?
Mexican classmate to my son: so you're Arabic?
Response: so you're Spanish?
Third classmate overhearing their conversation asks: Syria? So are you ISIS?
Are you going to kill me?
Response: nothing.
In case you didn’t get it, he was obviously frustrated and offended, yet he figured out that if others mislabel him or think he’s out to kill them, letting them soak in their own paranoid ignorance is an actual option. Unlike the confused fake-white 5th grader who raised this kick-ass 5thgrader, my son figured out that it is not his personal Muslim or grandson of immigrants’ burden to correct everyone’s ignorance. Translation: home-boy finally played his white card! You know, as in "real" white, like as in American, like as in his problem is also everyone's to fix. I felt bad that my baby had gotten cornered like that because I had not yet covered with him the chapter on Plan-B in our people’s user guide, Modern Muslim Manual, where it details why we all have that extra stash of bombs tucked away in the basement --you know, to blow everything up.
Come back, relax, don't dial 911
Duh, of course I'm joking. SoCal homes don't have basements dummy, so that's obviously not where we hide the bombs. Joke. I’m joking. Seriously damn it, we had a month’s argument just to allow the boys to have freakin' BB guns.
Count your blessings, you say? Yeah, okay, let’s do that:
1. The fire truck and ambulance arrived only a few minutes later than they should have. We could afford a phone and my mother speaks English. Also, unlike her local pharmacist, my mother did not need to draw the rescue team a map and pictures of instructions on how to do their job.
2. I attended my local elementary school. Despite my 1973 Indianapolis apartment door Islamophobia shrine, I had a short bus ride to my “normal” local Indianapolis public school. My African American classmates on the other hand, required a Federal order so that starting 1973 Indianapolis schools would forcibly desegregate --19 years AFTER the passage of Brown vs The Board of Education. What’s worse is that as you read this today, that same Indianapolis school district ended up with FOUR times more segregated schools than in 1973.
3. I got to be Jewish in high school. The worst xenophobia that my central-NJ suburban high school doled out was labeling me as the introverted gay Jewish kid –sentencing me to a year’s long torment of what it’s like to be upper-middle class without a girlfriend while also both un-athletic and academically over-achieving.
4. That Mexican student as lucky to have my son mouth off at him. The only reason a Mexican classmate exists in my son’s 5th grade school today is because in 1943 a school less than a mile away had expelled Sylvia Mendez stating she needed to enroll in a “Mexican” school 10 blocks farther from her home. It was Sylvia’s parents Gonzalo and Felicitas who won the Federal Mendez vs. Westminster case in 1947 which not only took down the 1855 California law barring the use of public funds to educate non-white students but also paved the way for the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown vs Board of Ed ending “separate but equal”.
5. I still make it past the initial color-of-my-skin screening whenever I walk into a store, business meeting, or leasing office, etc. Unlike most American Muslims especially hijabi’s, and all people of color -- I only get “the look” after sharing my loudly “un-American” name. Side note: Try the following if you’re white and still think such “looks” aren’t real: go to the mall with any hijabi or darker skinned buddy. Walk in to any store a few paces behind your buddy and notice the faces looking at your buddy. Also take note of which one of you gets eye contact first, and who gets served first.
6. They only hate my religion, not my skin color. Within a few months after landing my first post-college “real job” a co-worker very frankly explained how surprised she was to learn that I worship God and not Satan as her church Pastor had taught the congregation. Twenty years and a few jobs later, this scenario repeated as a Catholic coworker explained that, “you’re an okay guy, but in my church, we are taught to hate you.”
7. My life is not at risk when a cop pulls me over. Hijab harassment was all the due cause needed for Plainfield IN cops to pull over my mother back in the late 70’s, yet unlike my Brown and Black fellow Americans, we always ended up back home and not in a coffin or prison.
8. I could have grown up in Syria. Which statistically means that by now I’m either dead, injured, internally displaced, or starting life over as a refugee in a country that thinks I’m a criminal. Meanwhile, I would have also ended up as just another white Syrian who perpetuates the equally vile, fermented brand of Syrian racism.
Look back up at that list. Is THAT what blessings are supposed to look like? Is that what YOUR list of blessings looks like?
Summary version of the blessings list: Lucky me! Even fake-white still has it better than black or brown or hijab-wearing women of any color.
Truthfully, I really am lucky that a group of suburban mid-western Christian Americans disregarded Christ’s values so much that it forced me to re-evaluate my own scripture’s command that Muslims “be like the disciples of Christ” (Quran 61:14). I did not need to read up on Hitler or wait for ISIS or for Myanmar’s Buddhists because I learned first-hand from Plainfield’s Bible-bastardizing xenophobic WASPS that anyone can warp the purest teachings of their own religion into justifying hate. It taught me that my dead brother, my mother's burned hands, slavery and its enduring racism, Catholic-hate, Antisemitism, and of course the sexy new name for basically my childhood: Islamophobia –and all expressions of xenophobia feed from the same delusional wellspring of "I am better than you".
I was lucky to learn that even while I hope my family’s weird life was a humble contribution towards a better world, the fact remains that all my ranting about fake-whiteness amounts to the march of an ant alongside the far worthier struggles of brown and black Americans, as well as all my hijab-wearing Muslim American sisters of any skin color.
On the other hand, to all the “real” Iranians out there --yalls still owe me big time!
But yikes, the damn elephant is still in the room: We all know what happens to kids with tormented childhoods. They grow up to be jaded, sarcastic hobbits who have inexplicable and entirely random outbursts…sometimes violent. Yes, that's true for the white ones, you know the loners who are unilaterally entitled to our not "jumping go conclusions". The non-white ones and the fake-white ones become radicalized Islamic terrorist jihadists and only have violent outbursts. Yup, it's them: radicalized Islamic terrorist jihadists.
Response: nothing.
In case you didn’t get it, he was obviously frustrated and offended, yet he figured out that if others mislabel him or think he’s out to kill them, letting them soak in their own paranoid ignorance is an actual option. Unlike the confused fake-white 5th grader who raised this kick-ass 5thgrader, my son figured out that it is not his personal Muslim or grandson of immigrants’ burden to correct everyone’s ignorance. Translation: home-boy finally played his white card! You know, as in "real" white, like as in American, like as in his problem is also everyone's to fix. I felt bad that my baby had gotten cornered like that because I had not yet covered with him the chapter on Plan-B in our people’s user guide, Modern Muslim Manual, where it details why we all have that extra stash of bombs tucked away in the basement --you know, to blow everything up.
Come back, relax, don't dial 911
Duh, of course I'm joking. SoCal homes don't have basements dummy, so that's obviously not where we hide the bombs. Joke. I’m joking. Seriously damn it, we had a month’s argument just to allow the boys to have freakin' BB guns.
Count your blessings, you say? Yeah, okay, let’s do that:
1. The fire truck and ambulance arrived only a few minutes later than they should have. We could afford a phone and my mother speaks English. Also, unlike her local pharmacist, my mother did not need to draw the rescue team a map and pictures of instructions on how to do their job.
2. I attended my local elementary school. Despite my 1973 Indianapolis apartment door Islamophobia shrine, I had a short bus ride to my “normal” local Indianapolis public school. My African American classmates on the other hand, required a Federal order so that starting 1973 Indianapolis schools would forcibly desegregate --19 years AFTER the passage of Brown vs The Board of Education. What’s worse is that as you read this today, that same Indianapolis school district ended up with FOUR times more segregated schools than in 1973.
3. I got to be Jewish in high school. The worst xenophobia that my central-NJ suburban high school doled out was labeling me as the introverted gay Jewish kid –sentencing me to a year’s long torment of what it’s like to be upper-middle class without a girlfriend while also both un-athletic and academically over-achieving.
4. That Mexican student as lucky to have my son mouth off at him. The only reason a Mexican classmate exists in my son’s 5th grade school today is because in 1943 a school less than a mile away had expelled Sylvia Mendez stating she needed to enroll in a “Mexican” school 10 blocks farther from her home. It was Sylvia’s parents Gonzalo and Felicitas who won the Federal Mendez vs. Westminster case in 1947 which not only took down the 1855 California law barring the use of public funds to educate non-white students but also paved the way for the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown vs Board of Ed ending “separate but equal”.
5. I still make it past the initial color-of-my-skin screening whenever I walk into a store, business meeting, or leasing office, etc. Unlike most American Muslims especially hijabi’s, and all people of color -- I only get “the look” after sharing my loudly “un-American” name. Side note: Try the following if you’re white and still think such “looks” aren’t real: go to the mall with any hijabi or darker skinned buddy. Walk in to any store a few paces behind your buddy and notice the faces looking at your buddy. Also take note of which one of you gets eye contact first, and who gets served first.
6. They only hate my religion, not my skin color. Within a few months after landing my first post-college “real job” a co-worker very frankly explained how surprised she was to learn that I worship God and not Satan as her church Pastor had taught the congregation. Twenty years and a few jobs later, this scenario repeated as a Catholic coworker explained that, “you’re an okay guy, but in my church, we are taught to hate you.”
7. My life is not at risk when a cop pulls me over. Hijab harassment was all the due cause needed for Plainfield IN cops to pull over my mother back in the late 70’s, yet unlike my Brown and Black fellow Americans, we always ended up back home and not in a coffin or prison.
8. I could have grown up in Syria. Which statistically means that by now I’m either dead, injured, internally displaced, or starting life over as a refugee in a country that thinks I’m a criminal. Meanwhile, I would have also ended up as just another white Syrian who perpetuates the equally vile, fermented brand of Syrian racism.
Look back up at that list. Is THAT what blessings are supposed to look like? Is that what YOUR list of blessings looks like?
Summary version of the blessings list: Lucky me! Even fake-white still has it better than black or brown or hijab-wearing women of any color.
Truthfully, I really am lucky that a group of suburban mid-western Christian Americans disregarded Christ’s values so much that it forced me to re-evaluate my own scripture’s command that Muslims “be like the disciples of Christ” (Quran 61:14). I did not need to read up on Hitler or wait for ISIS or for Myanmar’s Buddhists because I learned first-hand from Plainfield’s Bible-bastardizing xenophobic WASPS that anyone can warp the purest teachings of their own religion into justifying hate. It taught me that my dead brother, my mother's burned hands, slavery and its enduring racism, Catholic-hate, Antisemitism, and of course the sexy new name for basically my childhood: Islamophobia –and all expressions of xenophobia feed from the same delusional wellspring of "I am better than you".
I was lucky to learn that even while I hope my family’s weird life was a humble contribution towards a better world, the fact remains that all my ranting about fake-whiteness amounts to the march of an ant alongside the far worthier struggles of brown and black Americans, as well as all my hijab-wearing Muslim American sisters of any skin color.
On the other hand, to all the “real” Iranians out there --yalls still owe me big time!
But yikes, the damn elephant is still in the room: We all know what happens to kids with tormented childhoods. They grow up to be jaded, sarcastic hobbits who have inexplicable and entirely random outbursts…sometimes violent. Yes, that's true for the white ones, you know the loners who are unilaterally entitled to our not "jumping go conclusions". The non-white ones and the fake-white ones become radicalized Islamic terrorist jihadists and only have violent outbursts. Yup, it's them: radicalized Islamic terrorist jihadists.
Radicalized Islamic Terrorist Jihadists.
Come back, relax, keep reading. Don't dial 911. It's a global economy now, and 911 has been outsourced to India so unless the IT guy at your office can make the call for you, there’s no way you are going to understand their accent.
Hello??? Game rules still apply: Jews can crack Jewish jokes and Black people can say the n-word, so this fake-white American Muslim hereby calls unlimited dibs on saying radicalized Islamic terrorist jihadist.
Come back, relax, keep reading. Don't dial 911. It's a global economy now, and 911 has been outsourced to India so unless the IT guy at your office can make the call for you, there’s no way you are going to understand their accent.
Hello??? Game rules still apply: Jews can crack Jewish jokes and Black people can say the n-word, so this fake-white American Muslim hereby calls unlimited dibs on saying radicalized Islamic terrorist jihadist.
Radicalized Islamic Terrorist Jihadists.
Radicalized Islamic Terrorist Jihadists.
Radicalized Islamic Terrorist Jihadists.
Yes please, a medium soda, large fries, cheese burger, and also a super-size radicalized Islamic terrorist jihadist. Wow, other customers who purchased the same blender got half off their next order of radicalized Islamic terrorist jihadists. Hi honey, I'm home, get those darling radicalized Islamic terrorist jihadists in the minivan and let’s go for dinner and a movie.
Golly jeepers, yikes -- now I'm even scared I might actually be THAT neighbor they warned you about on the news. And that would make Islamophobia whose problem now?
