Most mornings, Aysha Khan takes the DART train to get to school. But after Donald Trump’s victory in the presidential election, her parents asked her to drive.
“They were worried for me,” said Khan, a 21-year-old graduate student at the University of Texas at Dallas. “They were scared for me to go outside, as someone who wears a hijab.”
The Dallas Morning News (http://bit.ly/2fRTeua ) reports Khan’s parents weren’t the only ones who were scared. This past week, frightened by the sweeping victory of a man who at one point called for a national database to track Muslims, young Muslim Americans across Texas described feeling alienated from the only country they’ve known as home.
“Being an American is a very prominent part of my identity,” said Khan, whose parents emigrated from Pakistan. “It’s shaped my values and my beliefs. The fact that half the nation doesn’t think I’m American enough _ that hurts.”
According to a study released in September, hate crimes against American Muslims have skyrocketed over the last two years to a level not seen since the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks. Khan and others attribute much of that spike to Trump’s rhetoric.
“We’re going to have to do certain things that were, frankly, unthinkable a year ago” regarding Muslim communities, Trump said last year. He also called for a ban on Muslims entering the country and falsely claimed that thousands of them celebrated when the twin towers fell.
Since Nov. 8, there have been reports of widespread harassment against Muslims and other minority groups in schools across the country. In Plano, one Muslim student reported that a group of students called him a terrorist and used a racial slur to refer to his African-American friend.
For Zainab Ghwari, a community organizer in Sugar Land, the election results were a discomfiting reminder of the way many Americans perceive her. According to a Pew Research Center study, only 1 percent of adults in Texas identify as Muslim.
“I think in our community, we really underestimated the lack of empathy from, to be very blunt, the white Caucasian population,” Ghwari said. “I feel heartbroken today.”
A clear majority of white men and white women voted for Trump, while men and women from other ethnic minority groups overwhelmingly supported Hillary Clinton. Roughly 67 percent of U.S. Muslims identify as Democrats, up from 42 percent a decade ago, according to the Council on American-Islamic Relations.
Ghwari’s parents immigrated to the United States in the mid-1980s. Her father is from Jordan, her mother from Morocco. Growing up in Houston, home to the largest Muslim population in Texas, Ghwari said she worked hard to answer questions from strangers who didn’t understand her religious beliefs. She works with the Muslim American Vote, a Houston-based group dedicated to increasing voter turnout in the community.
She said she’s used to feeling like an outsider, but not to the degree she’s experienced in the past week.
“I already knew there was the fear, but I didn’t know there was the hate, too,” Ghwari said. “When people look at me, all that they can see is a foreign woman.”
Rather than having to engage with celebrating Trump supporters, Aicha Fokar, a senior at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, decided to skip class the morning after the election.
“I decided to avoid a situation where things could get out of control,” she said. “For my own sake, I wanted to minimize interactions.”
Still, Fokar said, she plans to continue wearing her hijab and praying in public spaces, although she has friends who have stopped doing both. She knows even prayer can incur suspicion among non-Muslims.
“Physically, we can be identified as Muslim. There’s no avoiding it,” Fokar said. “But I don’t plan on taking off my headscarf. A lot of my sisters are refusing to change anything themselves _ we’re going to die fighting, and holding onto our ideals.”
In his victory speech last Wednesday morning, Trump called for unity among Americans of all religions and pledged he would be “president for all Americans.”
But his strong stance against Syrian refugees, and his willingness to entertain radical ideas about how Muslim Americans should be treated, have Khan questioning her future in Trump’s America. As a woman, she said, she was horrified by Trump’s comments about sexually assaulting women.
“I feel like I’m in solidarity with every woman today,” she said.
But her visibility as a Muslim woman sets her further apart.
Although she’s getting her master’s degree in public administration at UTD, Khan said she finds herself reconsidering the trajectory of her career.
“I’ve dedicated my life to public service, and I intend to work in the public sector one day,” Khan said. “I want to dedicate my entire life to helping people. But it feels like they don’t want me here.”
