Suburban whiteness made a young Muslim immigrant feel judged by skin tone

Evidence

But in Elkridge everything was different. Maybe it had something to do with age, she admitted to me, because when she moved to Elkridge as a thirteen-year-old, all the judging started. You had to pick a group and stick with it. There were the white kids, the black kids, and the Spanish kids. There were the jocks, the Goths, and the brains. She could feel the tension among the groups, just as she could feel the stares of the white folk in town, a catalog of glares homing in on a skin’s hue or the kink of one’s hair. “It’s not like I looked much different,” she recollected, “but they see that your skin tone is not white, that it’s like a yellowish color. And they just judge you right away.” Elkridge was awkward. — Moustafa Bayoumi, How Does It Feel to Be a Problem? Being…, 596

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes the ‘complaints about immodesty’ and ‘grafting and growth’ essays’ themes — who gets to feel at home, and how racial aesthetics police belonging. Also parallels suburbanization-as-loss narratives in The Namesake.