Wildest thing supernatural ever pulled was the “two prophets can’t exist on earth at once” thing cause it results in a malformed prophet and..something something balance of the universe..something like that..I can’t remember. Like..what do you mean we can’t just have a cool prophet duo? We just deserved more prophets in general! They were so interesting and had layers to them,their whole entire concept was so cool to see and yet we saw so little of them in a sense. I just wish they were utilized a biiit more.

No Hate, No Fear

My brown body is insignificant here. I am a number to a population, holding numbers with lots of zeroes forever owed to the institution. Aisha, Prophet Muhammad's wife. A young, beautiful name just like her, slaughtered in pronunciation in each class that is filled with white names and white faces.

Reminiscing on my first year at college, I have identified the institutional problems that has been brushed aside by administration and students and into arms of people who look like me. This institution brands itself on its focus on diversity and inclusion conversations amongst the campus community but fails to commit itself to admitting diversity and practicing inclusion. Talking about race relations when there are no relations between races to begin with. Because people of color are lectured about allyship and intersectionality from their white peers but Black History Month, Latino Heritage Month, Native Heritage Month, and Focus Asia Month are only attended by people of color. It is a school in which professors deconstruct topics of colonization and discrimination but do not understand the extra self-care black and brown students must take in our world today.

It started the day I saw my parents cry for one of the first times in my life, the day they dropped me off at my first day at college. It was not a sad cry. It was a cry that represented the past 18 years. The past 18 years of hardship and sacrifice and the next 18 years and beyond of hope and success. Now my mother calls me everyday. I can hear the pride in her voice in each exchange of words. Maybe that is why I can never tell her that what was once my excitement of college is now hopelessness. I can’t tell her that her sweet child that has done nothing but played by the rules has been mistaken for loud and radical when faced with discrimination and the need to define her worth to others. I can’t tell her that she’s being torn apart inside each day as everything that she has always held on her chest with pride is the ammunition for others to isolate her and degrade her. Her brown skin, thick black hair, Arabic name and Filipino and Pakistani roots.

“No hate, no fear, immigrants are welcome here,” they would chant. The anti-Muslim ban movement found its way to our institution and into the guilt of the white students. A spokesperson, that’s all they wanted from me. “They want my rally cry, they want my pain,” I thought. “Are they really listening? Are they really learning? Their activism stops here at this rally. I am just a sob story.” They only want my soul long enough to convince themselves of their humility. But each time they take and exploit it, my soul disintegrates a little bit more. White faces and white guilt gathered around the Freedom Rock, the symbol of demonstration, for everyone except those affected. I sat in the dining hall, protesters with large poster boards walking could be sighted through the window, CNN on the TV as it always was. As I looked at the news flashing across the TV screen, I contemplated whether it was selfish of me to be dissatisfied but not take the opportunity to speak out.  It soon became apparent to me that I was not refusing to make my voice heard. I refused to be part of the pathos, a sob story that can be marketed and capitalized. My story and my hurt have been passed around on their lips and the sways of their pens. That is white academia as we know it. It is used for everybody else’s benefit but my own. For my family back home in the village will never know what oppression or inequality is. For them, it’s called life. And because no one will tell immigrant families that America is not the land of the free and home of the brave until they come for opportunity and stay for scraps.

This is when I realized that assimilation is a far fetched concept that my institution’s brochures tricked me into thinking was possible. We are unlike our kind, the “good ones,” recognized for our accomplishments as students of color. We are what W.E.B. DuBois would call the Talented Tenth, rather than people who are deemed for excellence by nature. It perpetuates a saviorship ideology in which we are expected to just look away in the face of discrimination. We should just be thankful we made it this far. College. A so called “post-racial society.” Because in the face of racial slurs, discriminatory language, it’s a student problem and “you can’t blame them, they don’t know any better,” and “you just have to ignore it.” No one is held accountable for the way I feel on campus, always watching my back and second-guessing who to trust because I never know deep down who sees me as inferior.

Maybe this is all irrelevant. Maybe in a few years I will not even remember this. But why is this my burden? Comfort and happiness or success and mobility? I have been forced to choose when they should be complimentary. I am the one who made it out, the one who will bring success, and finally bring my parents’ worries to rest. It is too much pressure and one day I am afraid I will break. The miserable part is that these experiences are always deemed as dramatic and exaggerated. No one else except my peers of color know what it is like to wake up everyday with fear, sadness, and a reality that others can just turn off. They are not just some cause that are put on signs and Facebook statuses. They are our everyday lives since we were children and were taught to be submissive and never talk out of place because you just don’t have room to mess up, work harder than the others because they don’t have to deal with what you have to, and always watch your back because you never know who might be out there with hate in their hearts. They are our everyday lives as we are put in institutions where there are few who look like us achieving success. And they are our everyday lives as the only time we see people like us in the media is when it is bad, when there is a shooting or drug epidemic. It’s a reality that cannot even be translated for anyone else to understand.

So here is to the predominantly white institutions that had fooled me into thinking that I belonged here, who has thrived off of the exploitation of my brown body, and has wiped out every penny my parents had ever saved in exchange for a piece of paper that defines my existence in society: 

These things will do not go unnoticed. I see you. We see you. 

Momma, it takes so much strength everyday to not just give up and come running back home to you. 

Daddy, I want to keep making you proud but sometimes it’s hard to believe in yourself when so many people around you don’t. 

You can count on me, though. I’ll never let you down. I am happy here knowing that I am making you proud and that in the future I can pay you back for all the sacrifices you have taken for our family.

This is not a sob story, another opportunity for guilt and exploitation. This is my narrative that no one can take away from me.