Skittles
Fatima Farheen Mirza
This image says it all. Let’s end the politically correct agenda that doesn’t put America First. #Trump2016
If I had a bowl of Skittles and I told you that just three would kill you, would you take a handful? This is our Syrian refugee problem. —Donald Trump Jr., September 2016
After living in the Bay Area since my father first immigrated there in 1985, my family moved in 2016 to a suburb of Dallas, Texas. By then, my youngest brother, Mahdi, was the only child still living at home.
“Will you talk to Mahdi?” Baba would call and ask me. “Cheer him up? He seems depressed.”
My other brothers and I would joke that while we had bloomed late, Mahdi had been born cool, but after moving to Texas, he had become withdrawn, muted. We were annoyed our parents had not thought it through: of course moving Mahdi to classrooms where he was suddenly the only kid of color, and to a neighborhood where TRUMP signs sprouted weekly on rough lawns, would have an effect.
When I tried to pry from Mahdi what he was going through at school, he’d only respond, “Just tell me how to explain to them that they’re being racist.”
We’d practice hypothetical arguments over the phone—logically, emotionally, statistically. Sometimes Mahdi shared what was said to him that he’d frozen in response to. How a classmate tapped him, asked him if his middle name was Mohammed, and when Mahdi said, “Yes. How did you know?” the classmate told him, “I’m keeping an eye on Mohammeds.”
We imagined responses for next time, serious at first, and then biting, and eventually just funny, until we were both laughing. Each time we were about to hang up, Mahdi would ask me to not tell Mumma or Baba. I thought they should know, but he’d insist so strongly, I had no choice but to listen.
When Trump first proposed a Muslim ban, my grandmother lowered her voice and told me, “Keep your passport on you. They’ve made their intentions clear. We have to be ready to leave at any instant.”
She was a worrier, and I’d often reassure her the world was not as dangerous as she imagined it. To be told to carry my passport was far more extreme than being told not to venture out alone at night, but even as I told her she was worrying unnecessarily, somewhere, lurking in my heart, I didn’t know: the line between conceivable and inconceivable was blurring. That year, I began to experience what I thought of as a kind of vertigo: feeling stunned as the world shifted around me before settling into a new concrete reality. By 2018, the sensation was familiar, and the Muslim ban was couched as a travel ban, done in the name of national security, but we were there, watching, when he first said it: “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.”
What surprised me, watching the news, was how little I was actually surprised by the hateful content. As though I’d always sensed it, unspoken unless I confronted it in men on airplanes, asking me if I was one of the good ones after learning my name. I was surprised too by how casually, how openly, and without shame he spoke, and how without shame his platform was received: how they cheered, celebrated, as though he was not just emboldening them but also liberating them.
My parents, though appalled, did not echo my grandmother’s apprehension. When my brothers and I voiced our own fears, they’d tell us the line we had grown up hearing, any time we walked away from an anti-Muslim interaction: “Don’t worry. He’s just one man.” And then, as though to convince us, or themselves, “There are checks in place. This is not legal.”
One afternoon, when I was still in high school, Mahdi came home from soccer practice, his backpack slung over his shoulder, and found me sitting before the television screen. There had been a terrorist attack and I’d been watching the same footage loop for hours.
“Please don’t tell me they’re Muslims” was the first and only thing he said. I was startled by his tone—so angry, so disgusted, that it seemed for a moment as though he too hated Muslims.
I remember turning to look at him. He was only ten. I said nothing, but my expression must have given it away. Mahdi looked as though he were about to cry and also as though he were just tired of it, tired in the way we all were—experiencing with each attack that blend of horror and shock but also the knowledge of what it would bring. Mahdi threw his backpack down and raced up the stairs, slammed his door shut, and did not emerge again for hours, an unrelenting rhythm of a tennis ball hitting against his bedroom wall.
In Texas years later, Mahdi confessed he’d started telling his classmates he was Catholic. For some reason we laughed at this, even as something in my chest softened. It was then that the image of my brother as a boy returned to me, how he had thrown his backpack down, just sick of it. How I had not begun to wonder then what I wonder now: what the accumulating effect of all of this will be, in ways so slight and untraceable I can return to each of these scattered moments and still never know how they have formed and marred our daily experience in this world, and the sense of our place in it.
During the two years my family lived in Texas, my mother never admitted to feeling unwelcome or unhappy. Instead, she’d insist that life anywhere was life, the sky anywhere was the sky. But sometimes I’d catch her trailing off when she spoke of our neighbors, a note of disappointment in her voice: “We brought them pies when we first moved in, we wave at them every time we walk by, but nothing, no warmth.”
So when the doorbell rang almost a year after their move, Mumma was surprised to open it to the young daughter of our thin-lipped and straight-faced neighbors. By then, the news was constantly playing in the background of our home, and each campaign update was more disheartening than the last—give them IDs, register them in a database, heighten surveillance in Muslim neighborhoods. Whenever I visited, I’d turn it off, tell my parents it wasn’t good for Mahdi to hear the same messages looping.
“This is for your family,” the girl said, extending a bag of candy.
Later, Mumma would tell me she felt relieved, as though she were exhaling. As though she had not realized she had been holding her breath, waiting for a gesture like it—and confessing her reaction proved to me the existence of the thoughts she guarded us from. For a moment, Mumma thought our neighbors were conveying that they knew they had been unwelcoming but now would be different, that although the atmosphere was thick with an ugliness impossible to ignore, it would not affect what existed between them, neighbor to neighbor.
“Thank you,” Mumma said, and the girl ran off. Then Mumma looked closer: it was not a gift bag but a ziplock plastic bag, unadorned and filled only with Skittles.
Mumma left the plastic bag of Skittles on the counter, and even though she spoke of it as harmless, as only slightly and possibly unsettling, she repeated the incident to each of us, and then to each of her siblings. My brothers and I were angry. We wanted our parents to either confront the neighbors or report it. To us, it was irrefutably threatening, and sickening that the neighbors had sent their daughter, a young girl. The incident came just days after Donald Trump Jr. had compared Syrian refugees to a bowl of poisonous Skittles.
“It is just candy,” Baba said, refusing to budge and forbidding me from writing about it. “This kind of thinking is not good for you. We will not be making a big deal out of nothing.”
Mumma was equally determined: “We will give them the benefit of the doubt, and if we do say anything, it will be ‘Thank you for the candy’—we will continue to show them by example that we are normal people.”
I was tired of it all: not just fearing for my family’s safety; not just the image that started to haunt me right before I fell asleep, of my mother in her hijab, alone in a dark parking lot; not just comforting Mahdi after his classmates shoved him, calling him ISIS; not just the flicker in the back of my mind that wondered what future we, as a country, were laying the groundwork for, one so precariously balanced it could be as simple as a match struck against a box to light a flame, and when the flame came, in what way, exactly, would we experience its burn? I was tired, most impossibly, of my parents’ refusal to admit how tiring it was at all, of their insistence that all was well, that we had not been wronged—which was another way of saying: We do not deserve better than this. That this is the way of being treated, spoken to, and spoken about that we have resigned ourselves to. And what pained me as their daughter was a lingering thought: Is not our belief in how we should be treated a reflection of how we see ourselves?
The Skittles, still in the plastic bag, sat untouched on our kitchen table. Mumma, despite having voiced her initial relief, was now silent. It was as though once she saw how the incident unnerved us, she decided to swallow her own shock and convinced herself it had been harmless.
“Mumma,” I finally said, trying to reach her true self, “if you really believe it wasn’t malicious, then why don’t you eat them?”
“I’m not going to eat them.”
“Then let us eat them.”
Mumma stood from the couch, lifted the bag of Skittles, and emptied them all into the trash.
It’s an anger I’ve known since I was a girl, one that revolves like a spinning needle. First, my anger points to the one who is racist. We are reentering the country, watching as the border control officer is rude to my mother, watching him make fun of her, tell her how we pronounce things in America. Mumma is looking down, Baba too. They are apologizing to him, then repeating themselves. Or I’m a teenager, driving with Mumma in a parking lot, when she hits the brakes because a man has just stepped out. “I’m sorry,” Mumma tells him, lowering the window. “Are you all right?” “What,” the man begins to shout, “are you going to bomb me next, lady?” And Mumma stammers apologies as he continues to yell. If these incidents are directed at me, I am free to respond emotionally. If directed at my brothers, I am defensive, protective. But come near my mother and the anger is so particular and unbounded that I snap, tell the border officer that in America we pronounce things how we like, and we are led to another room, or I shout back at the man in the parking lot, having never even known I could string together curse words so creatively and angrily against a stranger. During the drive home, or seated in the windowless airport room as we wait to be questioned again, I am the one who is lectured, told how my stupidity will get us all in deep trouble. Later, when my parents see how hurt I still am, they soften to me, and I am comforted. “It’s all right, Fatima. He’s just one man. His hate is his burden to bear.”
But once we are home and safe, the needle turns to point at my parents instead, and I ask them: Why did you look down, why did you not argue back, why did you apologize to him? The man in the parking lot, the man at border control, the man in security, the neighbor who does not wave back, all these changeable men who approach my Mumma and Baba with an unchanging conception of them. Why did you not demand, as I try to demand, how we deserve to be treated?
Is this very demanding born from a space in me that I can fill with anger or hurt or a sense of injustice, one that exists easily in me but reluctantly in Mumma and Baba, because I have grown up thinking of myself as an American and have known nothing else? Is the very sense of entitlement my protests stem from the same entitlement I resent in others, who wield theirs to say, “This is who our country is for, and by asserting its exclusivity, this is how we will make it great again”?
Every few months, while I lived in Iowa, Baba would call me and ask if I could write a novel about a white family instead. It was a familiar pattern: each time my brothers and I applied to colleges, we argued with Baba about our personal essays. He did not want us to write about our identity at all. Not how it had shaped us or what it had taught us—perhaps hoping that if we did not admit to difficulty, it would not be difficult for us. “You won’t get in,” he’d tell us, frustration in his voice, but also some fear. “They will read your applications and throw them away.”
In Iowa I’d remind Baba for the hundredth time that this was the family I was writing about. He’d sigh, tell me he was worried for my future, worried no one would read it. I’d respond with conviction, partly knowing that if I was firm in my stance, if I refused to falter, he’d have no choice but to be convinced, or at least to relent until he felt compelled to ask me again. I was not writing for readers, I told him, but for these characters, this family, to do justice to their lives.
I was not offended. I was hardly even disappointed in Baba’s lack of belief in the novel, knowing it was rooted in a desire to protect me. Still, what saddened me was what it revealed about my father’s belief in his own life, the undercurrent beneath his doubts that said, Who will care about me? About a family like mine?
My father had consumed the stories of others and the flattening narrative framed by the media for so long that I sometimes wonder if, when he lowers his gaze as the border control officer turns aggressive, there is a part of my father that has believed what the world has said about him. That it was not made for him. That in choosing to move here, he reached for more than he was originally allotted, and though he has worked to form a beautiful life, though he has lived here longer than he has lived elsewhere, he is still borrowing his place, walking through the world the way a man who knows he is borrowing does: gently, as though what he has built can be taken away. But if he does not draw attention to his difficulties, if he ensures the survival of his children by teaching them to do the same, then he can get by, carry on, continue creating the life he has wanted for himself, for his children.
After hearing the election results, I called my brothers and asked them to please not go out that night—a line I never thought I’d speak, having rolled my eyes for years when hearing it from my grandmother.
“I can’t go to school tomorrow,” Mahdi told me. “I just can’t do it.”
I told him I’d pretend to be Mumma and would call in sick for him, and he could go to the movies instead. We would not tell Mumma or Baba. Each of us was in shock. That night, the vertigo hit so strongly, it would be months before my mind settled to the shift, and I knew: what was possible or impossible to expect in one’s lifetime was so delicate, and so easily undone. Each time I closed my eyes, my mind crowded with headlines and chants from the campaign I had not even realized I’d absorbed. For years we had been told it was just one man, not tied to anything greater. Yet just one man takes a stage and addresses a nation, and the next day my brother is shoved in the hallway of his high school. And just one man tweets a photo likening refugees to a bowl of poisonous Skittles, and that very week Skittles are delivered to my mother.
My brothers and I were born here because our father, at twenty-two, decided to follow a boyhood dream. I wonder if it is because we had no choice in moving here that it is easy for us to criticize. Perhaps for my parents it is far more frightening, when doing so would also be to question their own choices, and to admit to feeling unsafe or unwelcome would also be to wonder if they should have moved here at all. Each question, each doubt, if followed, like pulling a thread that could unravel the foundation they built their lives upon.
That night, when I spoke to each of my brothers, my voice was even, controlled. I was calm, wanting to comfort them. But when I finally called Baba, something in me broke, as though I was still a girl who needed her father, as though I would always be.
“Don’t cry,” Baba said to me. “Don’t let this change you.”
I’d spent years wondering why my parents were the way they were. Wondering, after each anti-Muslim interaction, if Baba’s reaction was because he had accepted these to be the conditions of his life. But that night, his voice was calm so that I could be free to experience and express my own bewilderment. He was protecting me from his reaction, as Mumma had, in changing how she spoke of the Skittles incident. A protection no different from Mahdi asking me to not speak of what happened to him in the hallways of his high school, and when I pressed him for a reason why he was being so stubborn, he finally said it was so Mumma and Baba would not have to feel bad about deciding to move.
On the phone, Baba continued, “I will not let this change me, Fatima, change how I think. I will not resign my fate to feeling unwelcome here. I will still wave at my neighbors.”