In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Meet Aisha Challenging and Laughing Her Way through Suspicion, Surveillance, and Low Expectations At age fourteen, Aisha attends public school in Brooklyn, New York, taking Advanced Placement and honors courses, and averaging 90s in all her areas of study. “My goal is to get into an Ivy League school and study biology. I try to do a lot of community service as well.” With head covered with ħijāb and religiously appropriate American clothes, she prays five times a day, studies more than ten hours a week for school, and identifies herself as Palestinian. Both her parents are college educated; her father is from Jordan and her mother is from Palestine. Aisha’s friends and social life involve youth from various ethnic groups in the United States, including some from Palestine. She explains that “at home I try to balance out being a good Muslim. Many things are prohibited for us but some things I don’t follow the rules. I want to be more religious but still feel free to live a fun and stressless life.” Her food is a blend of cultures; her holidays are exclusively Islamic, but her music is fundamentally “American.” She says, “I’m one of those girls that you see who has like the huge book bag, and it has like eight books in it.” Aisha represents her identity map through the “daily routines” of her life. As she travels across home, school, and clubs, she’s always aware of the ways in which “Americans”and even her own community and family do and do not really see her: I am usually at home and I go to school and I go to the library a lot. I go to the Arab American Association and help out here. And I go to Muslim youth center and that’s where I do most of my religious activities and everything. And, yeah, I do community service a lot. That’s what I love to do. . . . I’ve worked with the Arab American, my Muslim Youth Center, I have also worked with JCRC, they are like a Jewish Community Center, and, yeah, I work with them and I also work at school. And I always study. . . . I want to just show people that like I am a good Muslim, I’m a good person. And show that like Muslim people can do things around. Because people like never expect that. 26 ❙ At the Jewish cultural centers, she explains: “OK, when I go to the JCRC I like it a lot because a lot of them are like Jewish there. Well, it is kids with different ethnicities a lot, but people who are in there are Jewish. So when we come and are likely doing really good and everything, that makes me feel good.” While she relishes these sites of diversity, Aisha also tells a poignant story of friendships fractured when she put on the veil during junior high in a striking similarity to what Tatum (1997) calls the “birthday party effect” to signify the transition from elementary school to junior high school when the friendships become less and less racially diverse. So right when I started wearing it, I started wearing it right before sixth grade. And I just did it during the summer to get used to it because if you can wear it in hot weather, then you’re good. So when I first went to junior high school, I had a lot of friends that I went to elementary school with, and I would say that half of them stopped talking to me. . . . I don’t know if it was just us growing apart and we were getting older. And a lot of them we kept in touch, but it felt more awkward or whatever, and then eventually we just stopped talking completely . So that was just so weird—and I was like OK—why does everybody stop talking to me and I just made new friends with whoever just accepted me better. Aisha struggles to integrate with her friends at school, and she also struggles with not feeling as connected to Muslims as she could be. Aisha is very clear that it was strictly her decision to start wearing ħijāb. She wants a more religious and cultural grounding than she is receiving from her family: Well, like when I was like a little kid, my parents never really taught me a lot about Islam, so like I eventually had to like learn...

Share