My Week As a Middle-Eastern American
The first time I visited Columbus, the city that is my home now, I was in college. I joined a road trip with a few friends from the University of Virginia to travel to a student conference on justice in Palestine. We briefly visited my Palestinian-American friend’s older sister’s home. She was beautiful — I could tell, even without seeing her hair. And we went to the conference, where I saw young adults whose Palestinian-American father had been put in an American prison for donating to the wrong charity group abroad. It was also the first time I heard about the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement.
I’m not Palestinian or Arab, and have lost touch with many of my Arab-American friends from college and grad school, but I will never forget some of their stories. I will not forget learning Iraq was being invaded together, and together knowing before our U.S. government ostensibly did that there were definitely no WMDs there. (Some of you now know how old I am).
I will not forget 9/11/2001, and the fear for my family members who worked and studied near the Pentagon, and not being able to get through on the phone. I will not forget quickly realizing there would be a backlash against people in the United States who looked similar enough to the terrorists who attacked our country, maybe even on our Virginia college campus. I wrote an article for the university newspaper which was…
