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BY RAMY ZABARAH
Esquire 

To be Muslim in 2016 America is to feel like eyes are always on you; like a task as simple as driving a car could end in murder; like any given day you might need to plead for your life with a racist neighbor. Imagine that people who look like you, speak like you, and pray like you are enduring horrific discrimination on a daily basis. Then, watch the man vying to be your country’s next leader add fuel to those flames. Internationally, a small group of fundamentalists dictates your culture’s public image, while in your country, a real estate mogul says you don’t belong in the one place you’ve finally called home.

The gap between liberal and conservative in this country has never been starker in my lifetime, and it seems to be reaching a boiling point. It’s been simmering for the past 15 years. I often think back to 2001, a pivotal year in my experience as an American.

I attended a Saudi-American prep school in Northern Virginia for the first half of my life—one that followed a regular American curriculum, but also required courses in the Arabic language and Islamic studies. For the most part, my school experience was wholly “normal” and “regular.” We wore uniforms, we played basketball against other schools, we even had pep rallies. Nobody treated us differently because we were an Islamic school.

Then 9/11 happened.

Our school received bomb threats on a regular basis for months after the attacks. Evacuations were common. Those days literally looked like an action movie—special police and bomb-sniffing dogs would rush in while we watched from the parking lot. And if it wasn’t some nut-job calling in a bomb threat, it was federal law enforcement harassing my friends’ parents with home raids. Then you’d come across some ultra-patriotic mom going on a xenophobic rant at a soccer game. Needless to say, my parents put me in public school the next fall out of a genuine skepticism that my Saudi-American school could provide a healthy learning environment.

The next few years were strange. For the first time in my life, I was surrounded by people who didn’t share my cultural background. I felt like an outsider. On top of that, I was constantly being reminded—either on TV, the Internet, or at school—that the default mass perception of people like us in the United States was grim: terrorism, despotism, extremism, whatever “ism” you fancy.

By the time I moved to New York in early 2013, it seemed the post-9/11 xenophobia Arab-Americans and Muslims in the U.S. were so used to had finally started to subside. Or maybe it had been overshadowed by more pressing issues like the economy, gay rights, and gun control. Then, in 2015, the tension returned.

Ever since Donald Trump announced his candidacy for President last summer, the word “demagogue” has made its way into so many thinkpieces, speeches, and social media posts, you’d think it was never used before. Here’s how Merriam-Webster defines demagogue: a leader who makes use of popular prejudices and false claims and promises in order to gain power.

According to a report published by the Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown University, there were 180 reported incidents of anti-Muslim violence between March 2015 and March 2016, a significant uptick that coincides with the rise of Trump. Additionally, the Southern Poverty Law Center found that the Trump campaign “is producing an alarming level of fear and anxiety among children of color and inflaming racial and ethnic tensions in the classroom.”

As a 20-something Arab-American man, I can’t help but always be cautious when I’m talking about politics in public, or going through airport security, or stopping to get gas through rural areas in my home state of Virginia. But I don’t even practice my religion, and I’m admittedly not very involved in the Muslim community. Many Muslims in America fear for their lives and the safety of their families simply because they attend a mosque, dress a certain way, or speak a certain language.

A lot has changed since the years after 9/11, and for the first time since then, I feel like an outsider in my own country again—like I’m not quite accepted. I hope that soon we can move on to a future that embraces the American experience from all perspectives and backgrounds, instead of one that pits us against each other. Surely then we can work more productively to solve problems, rather than create them.

Source: www.esquire.com