Not knowing whether prejudice caused a setback produces its own corrosive torment

Evidence

And that’s where Omar is now. In a place shared with many others like him, a place where you just don’t know how much power to attribute to contemporary prejudice. You know it’s out there, but that doesn’t mean that it has landed on you. And then you start thinking that maybe you have become paranoid. What is maddening is the not knowing. It’s like lying in your bed at night and hearing a mosquito buzzing in your ear. You swat at it in the dark, convinced that you’ve hit the tiny beast. But just when you believe it’s gone, the buzzing starts again. After a while you no longer know if the sound is real or if it’s just stuck in your memory. So you lie there, awake and blinking into the night, knowing that either way you’ve lost sleep. — Moustafa Bayoumi, How Does It Feel to Be a Problem? Being…, 812

Categorization

• XREF: The unverifiable ambiguity of discrimination echoes the ‘new racism’ / colorblind-era dynamics in Eduardo Bonilla-Silva’s Racism without Racists and the epistemic doubt in Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist.
• STORYSTEM: The mosquito metaphor — an ambiguous, unverifiable harm source that torments more than a confirmed one — could anchor a fiction about a protagonist trying to prove (or disprove) that they were silenced or passed over.