I was born white. I had fair skin and wavy hair when I was a baby. My skin got darker as I got older. My curls got tighter.
If I go to Egypt it only takes me a few days to get darker and speak arabic better. I look and sound more like them, and hey, to you it’s all consonants and Allah, how would you even see those distinctions? But Egyptians do. They can sense my missing virginity and American devotion to Beyoncé.
Even my parents, born and raised in Egypt, are starting to have the American glow. Their skin doesn’t look like it hasn’t been in Cairo pollution, inhaling second hand smoke, trying to make ends meet under Mubarak, or Sisi, or the next idiot president. They don’t have the European vibe of people who don’t go to the Apple store regularly. There is something there that wasn’t there when they left their home country 30 years ago.
My mom thinks Michael Kors is tacky, and gets stressed if her iPhone screen gets cracked. The people they were when they first got here, are gone. The woman whose wedding dress was a skirt and shirt the neighborhood seamstress sewed together. The man who walked around Newark trying to break his only hundred to get his wife her favorite chocolate, even if it meant passing it under the bulletproof glass, and feeling eyes on his shoulders. Those unsuspecting immigrants are now bougier and smarter.
And now they’ve been in America longer than Egypt. More winters in New Jersey than summers in Cairo. More trips to the Home Depot, more familiarity with Bloomingdales’ return policy than where you can buy grapes in their old neighborhood.
There is a loss to immigrating that you might not know if you never did, and try to ignore if you ever have. You don’t want to admit, that if you leave a place, and go to a new one, you will lose something. Especially if you have kids there. It is more than a financial risk you’re taking. I used to wonder if it felt like giving birth to aliens.
When my parents left Cairo in the 80’s to build their life here, I’m not sure they knew. That their kids would learn English as their first language. That their kids would think a lot of American thoughts, in English. That they’d probably never know Arabic well enough to dream or think in it.
That their kids would talk, and act, like a first generation hyphen and have first generation hyphen problems. When the cultures told them two different things. When America told them their rooms were theirs, and Egypt told them the whole house is for the whole family. When America told them to send venmo requests to split dinner and Egypt told them you never back down from a bill. When America told them sexuality was to be explored and Egypt told them sex was the bonding glue used to make a man and wife stick together. When America asked why they were still virgins and Egypt asked why they weren’t doctors yet, what would they say? What were we supposed to say to all these questions? Did we drink? Did we smoke? Did we have sex? Was lying about it respectful or disrespectful?
We didn’t know how to answer questions like “where are you from” or “what are you,” which even the most well meaning would ask. We didn’t know how to explain fasting to our friends and we did not know how to explain boyfriends to our families.
How could my parents have known all that would come? That their future kids would be up against more and more each year, as they would slowly realize they’re not white, as their home would want them less and less, and the world wouldn’t know where to place them, or their siblings, who, more than likely, would look very different than them. How could they know that their children would live in a country more and more obsessed with categorizing them?
Sorting. Listing. Registering. Their daughter will get asked if she’s half black/half white, or Latina, or Israeli, or Brazilian, or Pakistani, or Bangladeshi, or Lebanese, or what is she exactly and what right does she have to exist without explaining why she looks like so many things?
‘What are you, mixed?’ someone will ask her one day at work. She’ll wonder why they put the words in that order, like ‘mixed’ was the insult. She’ll go home and look in the mirror and remember when she just felt like she looked like herself, and not something that made people nervous until they had named.
How much do I have to look like my brother? And what if we look Egyptian, but you don’t know what Egyptian looks like, so you put it on me to cut into small digestible pieces. Explain belly dancing and hookah, and how Egyptians come in all these colors. Make some joke for you about colonization, explained how we mixed with other races. How I am brown and my brother is blond and how half the people in my family get ‘randomly’ checked at the airport and the other half wait for us in duty free.
I wonder if white people have to answer “what are you?” if they look Scottish and English and French and Italian. Or if white means never having to explain what you are. If white means your culture is not weird, and your name is easy to say, and you never have to cry and cry and cry because of the guilt and fear of all the different things every part of you is telling you.
And there’s no way my parents could have known all of this was to come. The emotional lawsuits I’d put them through, about bikinis and boyfriends and bacon, maybe.
Maybe they knew there would be culture crash, and it would be hard. But that there would be a snowball of fear that trampled over their finally mansion and finally family and finally american? I don’t think they ever saw that coming. And even now, they refuse. and I refuse. You will not take our finally, because you didn’t give it to us.
It all started because they wanted a new life in America, and they truly, in the cliched way the most immigrants do, believed in everything america said it was. they wanted to be a part of the melting pot, even if it meant melting.
And all immigrants really, believed in it so many times and from so many countries that that’s how it became cliche. Because it happened a lot. Immigrants believing in the philosophy that built this country. That anyone could make something of themselves if they never confused can’t with won’t.
America is a self-fulfilled prophecy that immigrants made. And now you want the brown hands that serve your lunch and vaccinate your children and take their culture out of their guts and share it with you, you want them to leave? They worked jobs that were below their training, with hours you couldn’t dream of, all in their second language.
My parents and the people like them, came here with something to prove and that’s what made them drive taxis with a degree to practice medicine in their back pocket. They needed to know that they could do it. They needed to know that everything — all the pain of leaving their home, especially one like Egypt, that culturally vanished in the time they were away, that all of it, raising children who tried drugs and had sex, that the arguments, the pain, the loss — that that cloud, had a bigger silver lining.
They wanted to prove that the burden of immigration, which landed on their families, which left their children’s psyches split in half, pales in comparison to everything they got back. It was ok that it hurt, because we got enough happiness and opportunity out of becoming Americans.
They did not just move, they changed who they were.
And now, our tiny-handed, oedipal-complexed, cheeto-skinned president wants to take that from them, for his own gain. I have news for you middle America. This ban isn’t for you, or your safety. This is for a small man, trying desperately to fill the void in himself with money and power. He doesn’t care about you, and he doesn’t care about me.
I used to be white. I lived before 9/11, when my mom would come into my third grade classroom and tell everyone about Ramadan. Because she wanted American to mean she could share her culture, and her kids wouldn’t feel so alone, fasting at lunch. They wouldn’t feel so other, if it was the last thing she did.
And I didn’t. It worked. Yes, Christmas had presents and came with a two week vacation, but it wasn’t so bad. Fasting built up my middle school street-cred, and my mom was always down to make enough baklawah for like 40 of my friends on 20 minutes notice. It was ok. I was other but it made me interesting. What do you mean your brother is blond? Say this in arabic. Have you ever been in a pyramid? It was illegal, I told them, but I had. It felt like I got the best of both worlds — ethnic but privileged.
Until America got more and more scared of me as the years went on. And like an unfair trick of sun exposure and hormones, I got darker skin and bigger hair as the Islamophobia got worse and worse. I went to Paris and for the first time in my life, I saw my brown skin. It wasn’t white. I wasn’t white. I was never white. Had this been true the whole time?
I never thought I’d feel this. And I bet if you haven’t, you don’t think you ever will. That racism will never come for you. I never thought about race, growing up the way I did, sheltered with a wreath of money. Doctor’s daughter. Blessed, educated, and untouchable. I thought racism was something that Hispanic and black people had to deal with. Not me, certainly not me, with all my white friends and Ivy League degrees. But things changed. I have watched things slip. The occasional racist comment turned from something we saw as unacceptable, into something fit for the centerpiece of a presidential campaign. I was the cool descendant of Cleopatra, the Rihanna tattoo translator, the Halal guys, then I was the reticence to speak arabic on even a domestic flight, and now I am the thing you must stop from coming into JFK.
I am no longer a white girl, with cumin. I have slipped further and further down the totem pole of privilege. I am just a problem, and I pray we won’t bring back the idea of a solution.
And if we don’t stop racism, its tiny hands will grab us all. That means you too, as soon as it becomes profitable. I didn’t know. But like I said, I was born white.
