Samira told me she had very difficult experiences when she wore the hijab after 9/11. She was in high school at the time and remembers a student blaming her for 9/11. She also recalled riding the bus to work and a passenger yelling at her, “Go back to your country, bitch!” She chose to remove the hijab because she no longer felt it was appropriate for her spiritually and noticed a stark difference in her experiences. In our conversations, she told me she passed for white after she stopped wearing the hijab, which empowered her in some ways. Samira enjoyed being able to feel like an individual rather than a representative of all Muslim Arabs, who were encountering a new form of racialization and the association of their bodies with barbarism or violence.

XREF: Connects to broader scholarship on racialization, passing, and how visible markers of identity trigger discrimination.

Saher Selod, Forever Suspect_ Racialized…, loc. 137