I watch as the color of my skin fades toward a searing white, as if the world could only let me exist by bleaching me of the histories that made me. I have carried the weight of maps I never drew, borders that I and no one else can truly agree on, and histories I learn filtered through someone else’s lens. In that vast expanse of inherited displacement, I wonder what it means to be Middle Eastern in a world that insists on categorizing me as “white” yet refuses to see the contours of my life, the ontological contradictions of my existence. The imperialist nation we vie to live in sacrifices our identity on paper, our dignity in the media, and our being in the judgment that assumes guilt before innocence. America’s empire expands quietly through borders, refugee bans, deportations, and the bureaucratic machinery of politics that control our movements and ignore, if not further colonial logics in the “hellhole” of the Middle East, as our Emperor somehow appraises the idea of renovating and saving a region and the conditions left in the wake of its own destruction. As safety is promised in words and security is measured in lies, I have grown older with the same narratives, yet I claw at the obscured shape of truth and scrape at the thought that my cultural survival may never be spared by those who dress themselves in protection.
I look behind me as the snow swirls outside, flakes clinging to the edge of the terminal windows, and for a moment, the gray Portland winter makes this place feel like a haven. Inside, the air smells of polished wood and citrus; the sharpness and sterility make me dizzy, though everyone else seems to breathe easily. The ceiling timbers are structured like an impossibly large ark, and the floor is a mix of the signature teal colored carpet and new tiles meant to reflect progress. My mother walks ahead of me, trying to hold Raya’s, my five-year-old sister's, hand.
“Yallah, eajily, Let’s go, hurry,” she says softly.
“Do you have the passports?” my dad asks. The contrast of my father's loud voice startles me. “We’re counting on you to get us there safely.”
It was his way of entrusting me with responsibility, an enormous task in his eyes. I check my jacket pockets; the passports are there. His is worn at the edges, softened from years of travel. The security line snakes through the terminal, a slow, shifting body of people. My backpack, my phone, my suitcase, and my belt sit in plastic bins as they glide down the conveyor belt. I feel stripped, exposed, the intimate contents of my life surrendering themselves to a machine and the surveillance of strangers. After passing through the scanner, a voice stops me.
“Random screening,” the officer says.
For a moment, I think he’s made a mistake. It’s always been my parents who were the ones pulled aside, had their bags searched, questioned while I stood waiting, watching. I’d built a quiet certainty around that pattern, understanding that our whiteness, our supposed invisibility, extends only as far as it chooses. We continue to reap the benefits of the stereotypical Muslim man in a turban with a thick beard.
“Step over here, please.” The words come out rehearsed, like a line in a script.
I nod. My throat feels tight. The patdown is impersonal. He feels around my waist and inner thigh to deter threats to security. Once it’s over, I sense the lingering weight of his gaze, like an extension of his hand pressing against my chest. I brush across the small cross around my neck, pulling it outside my shirt. I wonder if it means anything, if it matters that I am Christian, that I carry this symbol on my body, that I am not what they have been trained to fear. I wanted him to react to this, to shield me from suspicion, but I know better. Our faces, hair, or skin tone might as well be a flashing guilty sign. The officer thanks me like I’ve done him a favor, his words light and clipped. I step away, grab my bag and phone, and rejoin my family.
“Tamam? All good?” my mother asks.
“Tamam? All good,” I reply.
The words are brief but have meaning in what they don’t say. There’s both comfort and exhaustion in the word. We sit by Gate D17, waiting for the flight to France. The gray Portland sky hangs heavy over the runway. Our names will be called soon. We’ll board, buckle in, and fly across an ocean to another country that treats us the same.
“Arab people ride camels to go to school. In our countries, people live in deserts, in tents, while we’re anti-Western terrorists who ride camels to war,” my mom says, sitting on the edge of my bed, “That’s the Western image of us.” She barely had time for this interview, balancing work as an endocrinologist and parenting Raya, who’s taking a shower in the other room. The heart of the uniquely Middle Eastern discrimination is that all the beautiful parts of us that we value as a culture are erased, while we are left with the “occidentalism” propaganda that shapes the Western view. These reductive narratives reinforce the suspicion and misunderstanding in our daily lives, which forces the Middle Eastern to be the threat in any designated setting. My mom, even though she is classified as white on paper by the U.S. government, continues to experience the contradictions of prejudice firsthand. “No, I didn’t get any privilege of being white. I had a patient who asked to leave my clinic… as he doesn’t like my accent,” she explains. Social perceptions continue to deny us the privileges entailed with losing our chance at self-definition. The consequences of this misclassification are compounded by historical context and displacement. She recalls, “I grew up in a land always on the verge of war… in 2006, I could not leave home unless running for the shelter underground because another state was bombing my country.” The classification of white ignores the deeper discussions of our identity that are unique to each country. Middle Eastern people are often referred to as Arab or generalized by region, outside the census, of course, to hide the richness of our cultures and religions. Arab is used to describe someone who speaks Arabic, Middle Eastern is a general region, but what about Syrian, Jordanian, and Lebanese? These words carry the specificity of who we truly are. To survive in a world that insists on flattening us, we must do more than reject the white definition imposed by the state; we must reclaim the right to name ourselves and not soften our identity into palatable terms for Western comfort.