Growing up in North Dakota in the 1980s and 1990s, there was nobody who shared my family’s last name. “Husain? Hoooooo-sayn? You’re not related to … ?” teachers would sometimes ask.
No, I would explain, I wasn’t. My name was spelled differently from the then-dictator Saddam Hussein, and, either way, it’s a very common name in the Middle East and South Asia. Sometimes teachers would half-laugh; sometimes they would just look me over with a hint of skepticism. If they had taught one of my brothers before me, I could guess I was pretty much in the clear. But, if the Husain family was unknown to them, I never knew which way it was going to go. My best bet was to lie low and be a good, diligent student.
I was entering 10th grade at Central High School in Grand Forks, North Dakota, when the first Gulf War broke out. I was one of the only Muslims and brown kids there (save for my older brother, who was a senior in the same high school; there were some American Indian students as well). Grand Forks Air Force Base’s high schoolers came to Central, and it seemed like every third kid had some relative who was serving a tour in the Gulf War. This made for several uncomfortable jokes at me and my brother’s expense, some anonymous and ominous calls to our home, and even a threatening note or two pushed into my locker—notes that my brother confiscated before I could read what they said.
[For more on this story by DILSHAD D. ALI, go to https://www.theatlantic.com/fa...etic-muslims/555974/]
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