Reasonable Doubt
My Name Is Ahmed. Am I White?
The law says yes. My experience says otherwise.
O, my greatest enemy and benefactor in the whole world is this dumb-hearted mother, this America, in whose iron loins I have been spiritually conceived… But alas, our spiritual Mother devours, like a cat, her own children.
—Ameen Rihani, 1911
For as long as I could remember, I wanted to be white. I wanted to be white because Luke Skywalker was white, because the quarterback of the Dallas Cowboys was white, because the president of the United States was white.
But I was not white. My skin was brown, my hair was dark, and my name was Ahmed. I was the American child of Muslim Arab immigrants, coming of age in deep South Texas at the dawn of a new millennium, in a border town where last year children hoping to cross into the “land of the free” were separated from their parents and detained in cages.
A television bereft of heroes who looked like me or shared my name taught me the score: Your men are villains; your women, victims.
