Asad Haider - Mistake Identity: Race and Class in the Age of Trump

We all have to be born somewhere, wrote the philosopher Louis Althusser. I was born in a small town in Central Pennsylvania, though it was hard to figure out why. No one could pronounce my name, and at home we spoke another language; and every other summer we packed up and spent long, excruciating hours in airplanes to see our extended family in Karachi.

Im not so sure I emerged from this experience with anything resembling an identity. Whatever bits and parts may have constituted my selfhood appeared to be scattered all over the globe. Identity, paradoxically, appeared to be externally determinedor perhaps more saliently, not determined. Between the white kids in Pennsylvania who asked me where I was from (not Pennsylvania, apparently) and the Pakistani relatives who pointed out my American accent, it seemed that if I did have an identity, no one was really prepared to recognize it.

But I suppose I came to experience my identity differently in September of 2001. One day I arrived at school and learned that the country had been attacked, and for the rest of the day we watched planes crashing into the World Trade Center, over and over. I had trouble parsing the reactions of my classmates. Understandably, they were horrified, angry, devastated. I was puzzled.

It wasnt unusual to see reports of terrorist incidents, military actions, and even coups in Pakistan on TV. I remember a newscaster solemnly intoning that Karachi was the most violent city in the world. In my childhood summers there, I had seen the streets filled with children like me, who were homeless, starving, too weak to bat the flies off their bodies. Something in the political geometry was out of alignment, and the view from Pennsylvania seemed inordinately narrow. When Bill Clinton ordered a missile attack on the Al-Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Sudan, my sixth-grade teacher had us sit down and write a paragraph explaining why such an act was necessary. But I knew that on the other side of the television screen there was a mass of human beings who saw things differently.

The collapse of the Twin Towers, which we watched with disbelief, also reverberated in my everyday experience. Until then, I had learned to live with a culture of condescending and exclusionary toleration. But now it revealed an undercurrent of open hostility. I found myself being called Osama by my classmates while the teacher watched with either apathy or agreement. I was seized with unexpected fear at the ice-cream shop when an avuncular old white man suddenly scowled at the sight of my family and began ranting in our direction about terrorists from Iraq, as we made our way to a table, threateningly wielding cones of cookies-and-cream.

My identity had become a matter of homeland security. But how could I respond to such a scenario? Should I proudly claim a fixed Pakistani identity, one that never felt quite like the right fit, that belonged to a place on the other side of the world? Or should I assimilate into the world of whiteness around me, even though it was racist and parochial and had never really welcomed me?