No Vietcong ever called me a Nigger!

 

No Muslim has ever called me a “terrorist.”

No Muslim has ever called me a “raghead.”

No Muslim has ever met me with the reflexive paranoia or cheap jingoistic caricatures that white Westerners so often deploy.

But among white people?

The stereotyping, the suspicion, the casual cruelty—it is always there beneath the surface. It operates like a cultural reflex, a Pavlovian fallback inherited from centuries of imperial conditioning.

If they are not exoticizing you, they are demonizing you.

If they are not trying to consume you, they are trying to erase you —with almost nothing in between.

As Muhammad Ali once said in his own context: No Vietcong ever called me a nigger!

And likewise, no Muslim ever treated me the way so many “enlightened” white Westerners think they are entitled to treat anyone who falls outside their toxic tribal mirror.