Pretend I Am White

I’m not sure I was really seen until the 8th grade, when a bunch of misfits adopted me into their tribe. For the first time I could celebrate being an outcast by proxy. I didn’t know being an Arab or Muslim was subversive in itself but I used punk rock to stop hiding. Obviously my grandparents thought, “I had been corrupted.” It wasn’t until middle age that I could see it wasn’t just a phase but the only way to communicate being an Arab and Muslim in the 9/11 era.