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Meet Ayyad “A Regular Cute Guy” At age sixteen, Brooklyn born and bred, Ayyad insists that he is just a “regular cute guy.” A tenth grader attending public school, he describes himself as an athlete who spends three to five hours a week on schoolwork, is committed to going to college, and prays only during Ramadan. Both his parents were born in Palestine, and he visits there “almost every summer.” By all accounts, Ayyad is a “typical American teen,” and his interview revealed no tension at all in his hyphenated identities. Dalal: What about your identities as a Muslim and an American, where do they fit in? Ayyad: What do you mean? Dalal: So being Muslim: is that a part of you or a part of how you see yourself? Ayyad: Um, like on the holidays, we go out to the mosque, and like Ramadan my whole family fasts. Dalal (still trying): And what about being an American: is that part of your identity as well? Ayyad: Yeah . . . like we do a lot of American holidays like Thanksgiving . . . Christmas . . . Ayyad moves across his worlds with relative ease. Indeed, he was comfortable in the interview but slightly resistant to our interview questions that bordered on presuming some tension at the hyphen: To the question of whether there was a time when he felt proud to be Muslim, he responded, “No, not that I remember.” And to the question of whether there was a time when he felt it was difficult to be a Muslim American, he referred to 9/11, recalling that “some people talked . . . ‘you’re Muslim so you’re a terrorist’ but some just said, ‘Oh, doesn’t matter ’cause he’s Muslim means he’s a terrorist, no he’s not, that’s not true.”“I’m just a regular Palestinian kid. I do everything the same as every other. . . . I’m proud to be a Muslim.” His friends are “all mixed.” They play basketball, “go places, joke around, chill . . . play pool.” He also is on the Debka team and performs Arabic dance. ❙ 119 Ayyad’s dad owns a supermarket, “so I go help him out.” Although he is committed to going to college, he feels some pressure, as a man, to work rather than to stay in school. But his mother encourages him to “stay in school,” telling him that “school is the better way out.” On his survey, Ayyad indicated that he is most comfortable with people from the United States and from Palestine; his best friends are “both,” as are his holidays , foods, and “the way I do things and the way I think about things.” Quite at home across racial and ethnic lines, Ayyad personally feels little tension in his school, friends, and community. Although he rated eleven of sixteen items to be “not at all stressful,” his stress levels rose in regard to hearing jokes about or put-downs of Muslims or stereotypes of Muslim Americans as more dangerous than other groups. Most stressful to Ayyad are media portrayals of Muslims. Aware of social injustices, Ayyad tells the story of a cousin who was in a fight with another youth, but only his cousin was arrested. “Why did [only] my cousin get arrested for no reason and the kid didn’t do anything?”When pressed on why this happened, Ayyad said simply, “Discrimination.” His mother tells him, “Don’t get into no fight, see what happened to your cousin, it could happen to you.” When asked about tensions in school, Ayyad explained, with delight, that a teacher initiated a classroom conversation about injustice in the Middle East. Ayyad: My teacher brought it up once, that she is pro-Palestinian so she started talking about it, and she said how it’s not fair like on TV it won’t show the stuff that’s really happening, and stuff like that. And she got to go to Palestine and saw what happened and she found out the truth. Dalal: And how did it feel to be sitting there in class?” Ayyad: It didn’t bother me. Dalal: Did you feel proud maybe? Like someone’s on your side? Ayyad: Yeah. Later in the interview, Ayyad described another incident, in school, when he was able to share his knowledge and expertise with other students: Ayyad: When they built the wall, the big wall, and then they like, my friend said, “Oh, I heard that they built a wall,” and then I told him, “Oh yeah...

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