I'm in Canada now so I feel a bit more comfortable talking about this, especially today.

18 years ago (!) my family moved to live in the US for the first time. It was... an interesting time to try and live in the country, especially Arizona at the time.

(Some CW in thread).

Let's just say with some of the sentiment present at the time, my mom stopped wearing her hijab went she went out, and she told us every day to never talk about where we came from to other people. We knew in the community that Sikhs and Muslims were being targetted and shot.

Every entry into the US with my mother, who wears a hijab on her passport, because she is Malay, meant we were always secondaried. She always carried copies of the marriage cert, notarized, translated. My parents were always interrogated over the legitimacy of their marriage.

Even as I moved to the rural midwest, the fear of being targetted stayed. Being visibly white, with a white name, meant people were comfortable talking about their strong and occasionally violent anti-Muslim views around me. It was surreal.

The kinds of comments I've received have included everything from:
- folks wanting to strongly debate which sect of the faith I'm in and wanting to strongly point out to me how it's wrong
- folks who've told me that if they hadn't known peaceful Muslims they'd kill my family

- folks who have asked me if I will disowned/killed by family if I renegade on the faith

and so own and so forth.

I don't choose any of these situations. It's the kind of thing you have to build a tough skin for for your own safety and survival.

You may not know that legally my name is long and has Muslim components, since it turns out when you are born into two very different cultures and very different naming conventions, you have to be creative to satisfy both sets of countries. At the time it was a good idea.

There is a reason this full name is not on my passport. It's because of the resulting sentiment from 19 years ago today. One small reason, but a fearful reason I've restrained from pursuing a green card is that this name would have to become visible to the US government.

That revealing is not something I am very comfortable with, given my prior experiences at the border. If they're already grumpy when a visibly white girl with a white name who is Canadian is in front of them, what happens when it's now someone with a Muslim name and background?

Anyway, that's my story. I was lucky to be white 19 years ago, and have held onto that persona/identity for survival. Not everyone is so lucky; one of my brothers has a Muslim name, and I had countless brown Muslim and Sikh friends who do not have the same privilege.

Addendum: if you want to know what the weirdest kind of imposter syndrome to feel is, let me tell you that for literally a good part of a decade, I felt like an imposter to Canadian whiteness since I didn't know any of the culture or the food or the music or anything.

Now imagine you have to pose as a nonsuspicious white person who knows these things and fits in with all the kids at school up through college, or the people at work, for your survival so they don't discover you're an outsider. IT IS HARD.

Culture erasure is real. I spent a lot of my life erasing my old Malaysian culture to assimilate into Canadian/American white culture to not seem out of the ordinary. Recovering all that is now a huge uphill battle.

This happened to so many children of families 19 years ago.