Growing up Muslim in America
What it’s like to grow up as a Muslim in America today. Although Muslims embrace their faith while facing discrimination, they also suffer from anxiety as a result from racial profiling:
“For me, this issue is personal. My son was born in America but has an Arabic surname and is growing up bilingual, although we are not religious in any direction. He has my lighter hair but his father’s colouring. Once, in an airport, a woman asked me what he was ‘mixed with’. A look that fell just short of horror passed over her face when I replied, ‘Iraqi.’ I shudder to think of my son being on the receiving end of that look, just because of his name or the way his skin tans at the merest hint of summer.
“I am one of many parents who worry. Arwa Aziz, a 41-year-old mother of two boys, moved her youngest son Adam, now 13, from public school to a private Muslim school in Brooklyn because she was concerned about him being bullied. ‘He got so shy as he was growing up, so I just thought he would be better off there,’ Aziz told me while we talked at the Arab American Association, showing each other photos of our boys. ‘I tell my kids that they’re second-generation Americans, I won’t let them make us feel weak.'”
Veterans’ Struggle
U.S. soldiers returning home face a culture that doesn’t understand them:
“The 1 percent tends to be concentrated in the southern states and among the working and lower-middle classes. With a few notable exceptions—such as vice-president Joe Biden’s son Beau—the children of the elite have not served in these wars. It’s a sharp change from the night of Pearl Harbor, when Eleanor Roosevelt told a radio audience, ‘I have a boy at sea on a destroyer, for all I know he may be on his way to the Pacific.’
“Instead, America now has its first generation of political and business leaders who have not served in the military, and it shows. With the Pentagon ordered to slash spending as part of wider government budget cutting, military benefits, such as pensions, and college education funding for veterans are on the chopping block.”