As a Pakistani-American Muslim woman, I am terrified for Tuesday
I never thought the day would come where I had to fight to be recognized as who and what I constitutionally am
Just under a year ago, I was having breakfast with my father in Karachi, Pakistan when I first encountered the idea that the then-potential Republican Party Nominee for President, Donald Trump, wanted to issue identity cards for Muslims living in the United States. Sitting nearly 8,000 miles away, and in a self-proclaimed Islamic Republic, the idea seemed preposterous and a direct result of the American media shit-stirring from a lack of anything better to cover.
Nearly a year later, I could not have been more wrong. While the idea of identity cards has largely been done away with, the sentiment still stands. At face value, my specific ethnicity is and always has been ambiguous, as is that of my parents, but I am still unequivocally distinctly “brown.” I speak English ever so slightly differently from many of my peers, something that can be overlooked but easy to pinpoint for someone looking for a distinction. My passport is filled with stamps almost exclusively from most airports in the Gulf and Pakistan, with months between my entry and exit date. When people ask me “what” I am, I am Pakistani and I am American, before I am Pakistani-American; because I don’t quite identify with diaspora community in a way others do.
I was raised single-handedly by my Pakistani mother in the US—a quasi-immigrant herself, who was naturalized in 2008 after having started the green card process 19 years prior. Her favorite story involves registering to vote as a Democrat “before the ink on [her] certificate had even dried.” She went to a state-department owned American school in Pakistan completed her higher education in the United States and is absolutely everything I aspire to be when (if?) I “grow up.” She is the reason I cast my vote for Hillary Rodham Clinton on October 30th, 2016. It seems poignant that the first time a woman is on the ballot is the first time I’ve voted in a presidential election.
My mother gave up her life in Pakistan, abundant with love and support from a family who also raised her to believe she could do and be anything she wanted, because she wanted her daughter to have a better life. She wanted her daughter to grow up in a country where she could sleep easy at night every night knowing that her wings would never be clipped.
Donald Trump would clip those wings. In a way, his campaign already has.
I am usually scared of nothing and no one, and maybe that’s not the best thing. But for the first time, I am not just scared, I am terrified. A conversation with one of my parents in Urdu suddenly makes me self-conscious, and I’m more comfortable saying the highly-inappropriate thing about the rude person in line in front of me at the grocery store in English and have them look at me with disgust as a result of that, than label me a “terrorist”. Even if I write that off as a paranoia, how do I reconcile racially-charged expletives flung at me over a parking space, unwarranted confrontations in the street and obscene comments passed— in my own neighborhood in Washington, DC, let alone in disconnected parts of Virginia. I spent many weeks debating whether going home to Karachi for the winter would make the potentially inevitable interrogation at immigration upon my return to the US worthwhile; I ended up booking the ticket, but the happenings of the next 48 hours might honestly make December 18th my last day in the US for a long time.
The words Houston, Texas in my passport next to my place of birth might be amusing to those who know me and my classification of UVA as the “South,” but they are such a large part of who I am. In the many years of defending and reclaiming my Pakistani and Muslim identities, I’ve neglected my American identity, and truly taken it for granted. I never thought the day would come where I had to fight to be recognized as who and what I constitutionally am.
I am fortunate to have options. I can create an incredibly fruitful life for myself exclusively in Pakistan, but in doing so would completely negate the innumerable sacrifices made by mother for the last twenty years. She has instilled in me the most profound confidence in myself, my womanhood, and my ethnic identity. Women like her make me proud to be a Pakistani and a Muslim, and Hillary Clinton makes me proud to be a woman, and this country, while troubling at times, makes me so proud to be a part of it, because it is fundamentally a place where I know I can be anything, and I will not accept Donald Trump stripping that away.