The Hyphen That Never Ends

On Blackness, Belonging, and What America’s Racial Hierarchy Costs the Rest of Us

Before I begin:

Nothing in here is meant to flatten or borrow from the suffering of Black Americans. That story belongs to them entirely, the centuries of it, the ongoing weight of it. I’m writing about something adjacent and different and I need that to be clear upfront. I’m asking you to hold two things at once.

I. Charizard

I was seven years old when I watched the towers fall and whenever I tell someone that they immediately say — oh, on TV? No. Not on TV.

I was there. Close enough that the sky did something wrong and then the air came and the air was the part nobody talks about, this thick rotten smell that got into you and didn’t leave, and I was seven so I had no framework for what I was seeing, I just had that smell and the way every adult near me went quiet in a way that was different from regular quiet, and my mother’s hand finding mine and holding it very hard without saying anything at all, and I understood something was permanently different even though I couldn’t have told you what.

My parents knew immediately what it meant for us. Before a single name got announced. We were Muslim. South and Central Asian. Visible. And they’d been paying attention to this country long enough to know what was coming.

They were right and I’ve never stopped being angry about it.

A year later they pulled me and my brother out of our Islamic school. Not shame. Fear. Those are different things and even at that age I could feel the difference. They put us in the public school in our north Jersey suburb, a blue ribbon district, the kind that prints that phrase on every piece of paper it sends home like a credential, the kind that understands itself as excellent and safe and good.

First day. Teacher goes around the room. My turn.

My name is Scheherazade.

The boy didn’t even take a beat. “Charizard?” he goes. “You breathe fire? You’re gonna burn our school down like bin Laden!”

Kids laughed. The teacher was too slow. I remember the heat in my face, and I remember something sliding into place inside me right then, some understanding I’d carry from that moment forward. There was something about me that was going to be a problem in this country. Not anything I did. Just what I was. Just my name, sitting there in the air, sounding like the wrong thing.

He was eight. Somebody taught him that.

What he didn’t know, what I’ve thought about ten thousand times since: I was born here. 1994. New Jersey. Not naturalized, not recently arrived, not the child of people who’d just cleared customs. My father had been a citizen for seven years by then. My mother for one. They’d both gone to American universities. They had fifteen years in this country. Fifteen years of building something here on purpose.

By every document that exists I was as American as him.

Didn’t matter. Thats the part I keep returning to, years later, in my thirties now. It didn’t matter at all.

The thing social psychologists call the perpetual foreigner designation doesn’t run your papers. It doesn’t check birth certificates. It hears your name and locates a religion inside it and decides before you’ve finished saying hello that you’re from somewhere else, that whatever grief you feel for this country when something happens to it is somehow less authentic than your neighbor’s because your name sounds adjacent to the thing they’re afraid of.

I still brace before I say my name. Every single time. Twenty three years later and I still do it.

This essay is about why.

II. What Was Already Here Before My Family Got Here

To understand why my experience is different from a Black American’s, you have to actually sit with what Black Americans built in this country and what was extracted from them in the process of building it. I’m not doing this as a history recitation. I’m doing it because the weight of it is the whole point.

Before there was a United States, enslaved African people were already doing the labor that would make one possible. The colonial economy ran on their bodies. All that early wealth, the tobacco, the cotton, the whole material foundation of what became American prosperity, came from work that was never paid for, from human beings who had no legal recourse when the work killed them. Half a million of them in the thirteen colonies when the founders were writing that all men are created equal. Some of those founders owned people while they wrote it. I genuinely don’t know how you hold that in your hands without it scorching you, but this country has managed it for two and a half centuries so there must be a way I haven’t figured out.

Crispus Attucks died at the Boston Massacre in 1770. A man of African and Native American descent, one of the first people killed in what became the Revolution. A Black man died for this country before the country existed. I learned that once and filed it somewhere and I think about it all the time now.

The Civil War. Four million enslaved people by 1861. And I want to say something about the Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens because people still want to argue about what the war was about and he just went ahead and said it himself, in the Cornerstone Speech, that the inferiority of Black people was the literal cornerstone of their whole project. He said it. We don’t have to speculate. Nearly 180,000 Black men served in the Union Army during that war, fighting for a country that hadn’t given them citizenship, against people who had built their entire political identity around the premise that those men were subhuman. They fought anyway. I find that almost unprocessable. That specific, stubborn, costly love for a place that hasn’t yet loved you back.

Reconstruction happened and was real and got torn apart. Deliberately. Violently. The minute Black political power became visible, white Southerners who couldn’t stand it went about dismantling it with law and with terror. What came next was Jim Crow and what Jim Crow was is lynching. Between 1882 and 1968 at least 3,446 African Americans were lynched in the United States. The Tuskegee Archive documented every one. And I need you to notice: 1968. Not 1868. There are people alive right now whose grandparents were alive through all of that.

And then the Civil Rights Movement, which I think gets softened in the cultural memory into something almost dignified and procedural, like it was a series of speeches and court cases that produced legislation. It was people getting beaten on bridges. Children being fire-hosed in the street. Medgar Evers shot in his driveway. The 16th Street Baptist Church. Four girls. The cost of that movement was grotesque and the people who paid it knew it going in. When King stood at the March on Washington he wasn’t petitioning for entry. He was calling in a debt that had been compounding for three hundred years. The Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act weren’t gifts. They were centuries late.

I think about all of this when I think about the difference between what I’m facing and what Black Americans face. Black Americans were here. They built it. Their claim on this country is not a question that can be honestly raised by anyone. The only question has ever been whether America would pay what it owes. My family arrived. Chose this. And has spent every year since trying to prove that choice was one the country should accept. That is a structurally different problem.

III. The Foreigner Who Never Gets to Leave That Word Behind

There’s a body of social psychology research on what they call the perpetual foreigner stereotype and the short version of the finding is that being American is, at an unconscious level, equated with being white. Researchers Thierry Devos and Mahzarin Banaji documented this pretty rigorously. Asian Americans and Latino Americans get perceived as less prototypically American than Black Americans even at the reflex level, below conscious thought. When I read that research I wasn’t surprised. I’d been living in the data since third grade.

Pew found 78 percent of Asian Americans have been treated as foreigners in everyday interactions. One in five Hispanic adults were told to go back to their home country within the past year alone. Numbers. Each one a person who had to absorb that and decide what to do with the weight of it.

I know what that accumulation does to you. I know the particular smallness it teaches you. I was good at managing other people’s discomfort with my existence by twelve and I didn’t understand until I was in my thirties that I shouldn’t have had to develop that skill. I pre-explained my religion before anyone asked. I arrived at new situations already pre-apologizing for whatever friction my presence might cause. You get good at it, that’s the brutal part, you actually get fluent in your own erasure.

And it’s not just social. That’s what I misunderstood for a long time. The foreigner designation is also a legal vulnerability. It means your belonging here is structurally conditional in ways other people’s isn’t. Something will always come along to remind you.

IV. Fanon Knew Something I Was Still Learning

I read Black Skin, White Masks in undergrad. Fanon was a Black Martiniquan psychiatrist writing in 1952 about what colonialism does to the colonized mind and I remember sitting with it and feeling something I hadn’t braced for, which was recognition. He was writing about Blackness and I want to be careful not to just grab his framework for my own purposes, that’s not what I’m doing. But there was something.

He wrote about what he called the epidermal racial schema, this process where your skin and name and appearance become the first text anyone reads about you and that reading arrives already loaded with whatever the dominant culture has decided to feel about people in your category. You walk into a room and a version of you is already there, assembled out of other people’s fears and assumptions, and you spend the rest of the conversation trying to displace it with your actual self. You usually can’t. Not fully.

The mask. That’s Fanon’s whole thing. You learn to wear a version of the dominant culture’s face over your own. You perform belonging for an audience that has already decided you don’t quite have it. And the thing about the mask is it’s uncomfortable and it doesn’t actually work and you can’t take it off once you’ve started wearing it.

Hamid Dabashi at Columbia wrote Brown Skin, White Masks in 2011 as a direct response to Fanon from within Middle Eastern communities after 9/11. Glen Coulthard wrote Red Skin, White Masks in 2014 about Indigenous North America. People keep coming back to Fanon’s frame and rewriting it for their own communities and that’s not an accident, it’s because the specific violence of being made into an Other works similarly across contexts even when the details are completely different.

What Fanon gave me was a name for the mask that doesn’t fit. I do everything right. Perfect English, all the cultural references, every institutional hoop. And still someone looks at my name and decides before I open my mouth. An eight year old in a blue ribbon school in Jersey already had that decision pre-loaded. Assimilation has no finish line. Nobody tells you that part when you’re a kid.

V. They Called It Arab. They Meant Muslim. They Meant Me.

Let me be clear about the September 11 framing because I think it still gets muddled.

Nineteen men. Al-Qaeda. Fifteen of them Saudi nationals. None from my family’s countries. The only connection between me and those men was one word.

Muslim.

Early media coverage focused on Arab identity and those were accurate terms for those specific men and that specific crime. But what moved through the American public was something much blunter than accuracy. It became a Muslim attack. Which meant every Muslim was implicated. Didn’t matter your nationality, your ethnicity, how many thousands of miles there were between you and those men, how loudly you condemned what they did. Muslim was now a threat category and if you were in it you were in it.

Islamophobia is worth naming straight. It’s not really about Arabs. It’s not even a coherent fear of terrorism. It’s a fear of Islam itself, and it operates completely outside of facts. Al-Qaeda’s ideology was fringe, rejected by Islamic scholars globally. The overwhelming majority of Muslims on earth had nothing to do with nineteen men. None of that penetrated. Islamophobia doesn’t wait for nuance. It finds a face and makes it the face of the fear.

My parents pulled us from the Islamic school because our visibility had become a liability and sheltering something you love from something that wants to hurt it is not the same as being ashamed of it. I knew the difference even then.

Scholar Louise Cainkar documented how 9/11 “consolidated the racialization of the category Arab/Middle Eastern/Muslim as a signifier of non-white otherness.” But it went past racialization. We weren’t seen as less American. We were seen as un-American. One is a failure to assimilate. The other is a verdict.

A 2013 Stanford study found that 49 percent of Americans believed Sikhism was a sect of Islam. Nearly half. Sikh men were attacked because turbans got misread as markers of a religion they didn’t practice. The suspicion didn’t need accuracy. It needed a face in the vicinity of the fear.

Hari Kondabolu said South Asian Americans were victimized twice and that’s exactly right. We stood in that smoke same as everyone else and then we also had to manage our country deciding we were the enemy. Grief and fear at the same time about the same event pointing in opposite directions. I was seven. I just had both feelings with nowhere to put them.

Haroon Moghul, a Muslim American writer, said “all of a sudden your identity was completely under interrogation.” I’ve thought about that sentence constantly. My Muslim identity before 9/11, the way I recieve it in memory, was private and warm and mine. My grandmother’s hands. Ramadan. A particular kind of Arabic that lived somewhere in my body before I understood it as language. After 9/11 it became a public object. Something to be explained and defended in rooms full of people who had already decided what they thought.

I was eight years old defending my own faith to strangers.

The boy in my class wasn’t an anomaly. He was the first one who said it to my face.

VI. 2025 Broke Something in Me That I Haven’t Fixed Yet

For a long time I kept a quiet deal going with this country. Hard but livable. I have papers, I have an education, I know how to navigate without triggering the wrong thing. The hostility spikes in moments of crisis and then settles back. I can manage the baseline. I believed this. Or I worked hard at believing it.

The immigration enforcement escalation of 2025 broke that.

Human Rights Watch documented raids and detentions built around targeting people by perceived race and national origin. The 2025 federal budget put $170 billion toward enforcement and deportations. By early 2026 roughly 73,000 immigrants were in ICE custody, up 84 percent from January 2025, and over 70 percent of them had no criminal record. 32 people died in ICE custody in 2025. Thirty two. The agency’s deadliest year in over two decades.

I sat with that number for days. 32 people dead in custody. Most of them without a criminal record. Just people a government decided needed removing and who died in the process.

It fell hardest on Latino communities and Latino men specifically, and research from the New York Immigration Coalition showed that was a consistent pattern no matter how you sliced the data. Brookings found 16 percent of foreign-born Latinos had stopped calling the police out of fear they’d be asked about their status. People stopped going to work. A woman interviewed by Human Rights Watch said she felt “not safe anywhere, it’s like I’m in a cave.” In a cave. In her own country.

Stop AAPI Hate documented that ICE arrests of Asian immigrants went up fourfold under Trump compared to the same stretch under Biden. Indian nationals were the second largest group among those arrested. Nine Asian immigrants died in ICE custody in 2025. People got deported to Ecuador and Sudan, countries with no connection to them at all, no family, no language, nothing, just somewhere the government could put them that was far enough away.

In Chicago an immigration lawyer named Vivian Khalaf was fielding seven or eight calls a day from Palestinian families. People with active legal cases, people doing everything the system asked, showing up to court, fighting through the process. Still getting detained. She said there was a profound sense of fear and anxiety in her community and I think that’s actually underselling it.

Reading all of this I felt something I’d been avoiding looking at directly for years. The fear that doing everything right isn’t actually protection. That your papers hold only as long as the political weather allows them to. That your belonging here is, at a level that doesn’t appear in any document, conditional.

Stop AAPI Hate reported on a Pacific Islander man who left a comment on a social media post about dolphins being released. A normal comment, about dolphins. Someone responded threatening to report him to ICE. He was a citizen. He wrote afterward: “Is this 1930s Germany? I fear for my safety.”

A citizen. Threatened with ICE. Over dolphins.

Nobody is threatening to deport Black Americans and I want to be careful about how I say this because the violence the American state directs at Black communities is real and ongoing and I’m not trying to compare or rank it. But this particular thing, the idea that your presence here is revocable, that the government can decide to remove you from a country you were born in or have lived in for decades, that specific threat is not one Black Americans live with the same way. Their citizenship got fought for in a way that made it permanent in a way mine hasn’t been yet.

Thats what 2025 made undeniable. The conditionality I’d always felt in a low-grade way has a physical form. It drives a van. It detains people outside their kids’ schools. It is not a feeling. It’s policy. And it has made people I know afraid to leave their houses.

VII. How Far They Have Come and Where I Am Still Standing

I don’t have the right word for what I feel when I think about the distance Black Americans have traveled in this country. Awe is close but it’s the complicated kind, the kind that comes from watching people survive something that by rights should have broken them and then build something extraordinary out of what was left over.

Four million people in chains in 1861 and then the Oval Office in 2008. I know that’s not a straight line, I’m not trying to make it one. The wealth gap is real. The criminal justice system still swallows Black men at rates that only make sense through racism. Police violence is ongoing and documented and nowhere near adequately addressed.

But the distance. Frederick Douglass writing himself into freedom. Thurgood Marshall. James Baldwin writing about this place with more honesty and more love than it had earned and refusing to leave even when every reason to was right there in front of him. The music. God, the music alone, the way Black American culture became American culture became the thing the rest of the world understands as American and still gets called a contribution instead of the source.

That progress came from people who refused generation after generation to accept a verdict that was wrong about them from the start. I think about what that refusal costs across generations and I feel genuinely humbled by it.

And I’m still at the door. Still saying my name and watching someone’s face do the math. Still carrying that first day of third grade like a splinter that never came all the way out. My claim on this country is newer and shallower and more contested in ways that aren’t hypothetical anymore, that show up in budget allocations and in people I know being afraid to go to the grocery store.

These aren’t the same fights. They share an enemy but they’re not the same thing. Pretending otherwise doesn’t help anybody.

VIII. What I’m Actually Trying to Say

Not pity. I’m not asking for it. What I want is an honest accounting.

I want people who aren’t in this position to sit with what it actually means that I was born here, that my parents were citizens, that by every objective measure I was as American as the kid who called me Charizard, and none of that made me legible to him as American. None of it. What does that say about what American actually means in practice rather than on paper.

I want people to understand that the logic that made an eight year old in a blue ribbon school in Jersey decide my name was a fire hazard is the same logic, the exact same logic, scaled up and given a $170 billion budget and a fleet of vans, that is putting people in detention centers right now with no criminal record. The microaggression and the deportation center are the same impulse at different volumes.

And real solidarity across communities of color doesn’t need everyone to agree their situations are identical. It needs honesty about what each community is actually up against, and what each one actually needs, and then showing up in the ways that are genuinely useful instead of the ways that just make you feel like you’re doing something.

Black Americans have been fighting for equality inside this country for centuries. Those of us who came later face different specific expressions of the same underlying machinery. We can either pretend we’re all in the same boat or we can be honest that we’re in adjacent boats with different problems and start actually passing each other materials.

IX. My Name

My name is Scheherazade.

In the original story she was a woman who survived by refusing to be the last thing a murderous king decided about her. Every night a new story, stopped at the exact moment he needed to know what happened next, and this went on for a thousand and one nights. She survived by being impossible to stop listening to. By being irreplaceable as the person who continued the story.

My parents named me for her before they could have known what that name would cost in north Jersey after September 11. Before they could have known I’d spend my whole life learning to tell my own story in rooms that had already made up their minds about me. I think about the accidental precision of it.

I love this country. I do. With that specific bruised love that comes from fighting to claim something, from watching it burn when you’re seven and breathing the air of it and grieving for it the way you grieve for something that is yours even when it doesn’t act like you’re its. I love it and I’m angry at it and I am so tired of performing a gratitude I don’t entirely feel in exchange for a belonging I haven’t fully been given.

Born here. Parents were citizens. Stood in the smoke of this country’s worst morning and have been explaining myself to it for twenty three years since. That is honestly the most American thing I can imagine. The perpetual audition for a part that should have been mine at birth.

The hyphen isn’t a bridge. It’s a record. Of everything this country hasn’t accepted about me without reservation. But I’ve decided to be here without reservation anyway, or as close to it as twenty three years of being told otherwise will allow. This is my country. The work isn’t finished and I’m not finished either.

Black Americans bent this country toward something better by refusing to let it stay what it was. The least I can do is refuse to let it stay what it is.

That’s what I’m trying to say.

I’m still here.

 

Works Cited and Consulted

Blackmon, Douglas A. Slavery by Another Name.Doubleday, 2008.

Brookings Institution. “Racial Profiling by ICE Will Have a Marked Impact on Latino Communities.” October 2025.

Cainkar, Louise. “No Longer Invisible: Arab and Muslim Exclusion After September 11.” Middle East Report, ISPU, 2002.

Coulthard, Glen Sean. Red Skin, White Masks. University of Minnesota Press, 2014.

Dabashi, Hamid. Brown Skin, White Masks. Pluto Press, 2011.

Devos, Thierry, and Mahzarin Banaji. “American = White?” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,88(3), 2005.

Du Bois, W.E.B. The Souls of Black Folk. 1903.

Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Trans. Richard Philcox. Grove Press, 1952/2008.

HIAS. “The ICE Raids: What You Need to Know.” hias.org, updated March 2026.

Human Rights Watch. “US: ICE Abuses in Los Angeles Set Stage for Other Cities.” November 4, 2025.

Justice For All. American Muslims 2025: A Brief Profile.justiceforall.org, January 2025.

Mandle, Jay R. Not Slave, Not Free. Duke University Press, 1992.

New York Immigration Coalition. “Unmasking ICE’s Anti-Latino Practices.” December 2025.

Pew Research Center. “Asian Americans and the ‘Forever Foreigner’ Stereotype.” November 30, 2023.

Pew Research Center. “Latinos’ Experiences with Immigration Enforcement in Trump’s Second Term.” November 24, 2025.

Sirin, Selcuk R., and Michelle Fine. “Hyphenated Selves.” Applied Developmental Science, 11(3), 2007.

Stanford Peace Innovation Lab. Sikh misidentification study. 2013.

Stop AAPI Hate. “Keeping Count: A/PI Adults Feel the Impact of ICE.” March 2026.

Takaki, Ronald. Strangers from a Different Shore. Little, Brown, 1989.

Washington, Booker T. Up From Slavery. Doubleday, 1901.