The Stranger in the Midwest

The rejection did not begin with hostility. It began with a smile, a warm, genuine, almost maternal smile from a woman named Barbara who worked at the local library, a smile that was meant to be welcoming but that, when Dr. Amir Rashid looked at it closely, contained something else: a question, an evaluation, a measurement of the distance between who he was supposed to be and who he actually was. Dr. Rashid was a professor of comparative literature at a small college in a small town in Iowa, and he had been here for three years, and in three years he had never been shouted at, never been threatened, never been called a name, but he had been smiled at with a particular expression, a smile that said welcome and Are you safe and Are you one of us and Are you one of them all at once, and the smile was more isolating than any shout could have been, because a shout is a boundary that you can see, and a smile that contains a question is a boundary that you cannot see until you have walked into it and discovered that the person smiling at you has already decided that you do not belong on this side of the line. The social immunity of the town had been activated by 9/11. Social immunity is a concept borrowed from biology. In the human body, the immune system identifies foreign agents and responds by mounting a defense. The defense is not malicious. It is not designed to harm. It is designed to protect, and in the process of protecting, it excludes, isolates, and sometimes destroys what it identifies as foreign. The town of Oakhaven, Iowa, population 4,200, had no history of violence. There had been no hate crimes, no KKK rallies, no incidents of public harassment. But social immunity does not require history. It requires perception. It requires a community to perceive an external threat, and once the threat is perceived, the immune response begins, automatically, silently, gradually, and it does not look like the violence that the threat was supposed to prevent. It looks like a smile that contains a question. It looks like a colleague who stops inviting you to Friday night drinks. It looks like a neighbor who no longer waves. It looks like a store clerk who watches you more closely than they watch anyone else, who assumes that your presence requires explanation, who asks you, casually, conversationally, Where are you really from, as if the answer could satisfy them, as if the answer could be anything other than a place that would make the smile on their face disappear. Dr. Rashid tried to understand. He tried to explain himself, not in a way that was defensive or confrontational, but in a way that was human. He invited people to his apartment for dinner. He attended faculty meetings. He graded his students papers with the same care he had always given them, the same care that he had given every student since he had first come to America twenty years ago, a student from Lebanon who had come to study literature and had stayed because he loved the books and the thinking and the argument and the idea that a person could be judged by what they said rather than by where they were born. But the immune response was not rational. It did not respond to reason. It responded to the presence of the foreign, and Dr. Rashid was foreign, not because of anything he had done but because of what he was, because of the color of his skin, the shape of his face, the name on his paycheck, the mosque that he attended on Friday mornings, the mosque that was two blocks from campus and had received three complaints from the neighborhood association since 2001, complaints that were not complaints, technically, but requests for information, requests that asked the mosque to explain its activities, to provide visitor logs, to demonstrate that it was not a threat, as if any organization that needed to demonstrate that it was not a threat was, by definition, a threat. The immunity response was slow, and that was its power. It was not a wave of hostility that Dr. Rashid could point to and identify and fight. It was a series of small exclusions, small distances, small silences, a thousand tiny acts of social refinement that had the cumulative effect of making him feel, every single day, like a body that was rejecting a transplant, like a system that was识别ing a foreign agent and responding with a slow, methodical, polite rejection that was more devastating than any violence because it was deniable. The woman at the library, Barbara, smiled at him every time he walked in, and every smile was a question, and every question was a boundary, and every boundary was a wall, and the walls accumulated until Dr. Rashid was standing in the center of a town that loved the idea of diversity but did not love him, that welcomed the concept of difference but not the reality of his difference, that celebrated the contribution of immigrants but not the presence of his body in their spaces, and the immunity was working perfectly, because it was not violent, it was not illegal, it was not even mean, and it was working so well that Dr. Rashid could not point to a single act of hostility and say this is why I am leaving, because there was nothing to point to, and the absence of anything to point to was the most powerful thing of all, because it meant that the rejection was complete, and total, and deniable, and therefore inescapable.

And Dr. Rashid could not fight this, because there was nothing to fight. There was no enemy, no antagonist, no villain, no person to confront or argue with or demand an explanation from, because the exclusion was not deliberate. It was automatic, like an immune response, like a body rejecting a transplant, like a system identifying foreign DNA and mounting a defense that was not malicious but was nonetheless devastating, and the devastation was in the details, in the smile that contained a question, in the colleague who stopped inviting, in the neighbor who stopped waving, in the clerk who watched more closely, in the mother who pulled her children closer when he walked by, in the father who told his children to be polite to Dr. Rashid but not too polite, not friendly, just polite, because friendliness implied belonging, and belonging was not possible, and Dr. Rashid understood this, he understood that he was living in a community that had mounted a social immune response, and the response was not driven by hatred, it was driven by fear, and fear is not a choice, it is a reflex, and you cannot argue with a reflex, you can only wait for it to pass, and it was not passing, because the threat that had triggered it, the threat of 9/11, was still present, or at least the memory of it was still present, and the memory was the threat, and the threat was the fear, and the fear was the immunity, and the immunity was the rejection, and the rejection was slow and gradual and deniable and therefore inescapable, and Dr. Rashid was tired, not of the rejection, because the rejection was too slow to tire you, it was too gentle, too polite, too small, you could not tire of small things, you could only accumulate them, accumulate them like dust on a photograph, layer after layer, until the photograph was grey and the faces were invisible and the smiles were blank and the barn was just a grey shape and the sky was just grey, and the photograph was grey, and the kitchen was grey, and the ledger was grey, and the boots were grey, and the water in the glass was grey, and Samuel Grady was grey, and the dust was grey, and the grey was total, and there was no way to brush off the dust, because the dust was not on the surface, the dust was the surface, and the surface was the world, and the world was grey, and Dr. Rashid was grey, not in color, but in spirit, not in appearance, but in feeling, in the feeling that he was becoming grey, that he was becoming part of the grey, that the grey was inside him, in his chest, in his throat, in his mind, in the thoughts he thought and the words he spoke and the stories he taught his students, because he was a professor, and he taught stories, and the stories he taught were about people who were different, who were foreign, who were rejected, who were excluded, who were the subjects of a social immune response that was not malicious but was nonetheless devastating, and he taught these stories to his students, and his students listened, and some of them understood, and some of them did not, and the ones who understood felt it too, felt the grey, felt the distance, felt the rejection that was not rejection, felt the exclusion that was not exclusion, felt the question that was not a question, felt the smile that was not a smile, and the grey spread from Dr. Rashid to his students to their families to their neighborhoods to their communities, and the grey was contagious, and the grey was the immunity, and the immunity was the fear, and the fear was the memory, and the memory was 9/11, and 9/11 was eight years ago, and eight years is a long time, and the immunity should have passed by now, the body should have stopped rejecting, the system should have stopped identifying, the fear should have faded, but it had not faded, and the grey had not lifted, and the photograph was still grey, and the kitchen was still grey, and the world was still grey, and Dr. Rashid was still there, standing in the grey, waiting for the grey to pass, waiting for the immunity to recede, waiting for the fear to fade, waiting for the smile to be just a smile, waiting for the question to be just a question, waiting for the boundary to dissolve, waiting for the foreign agent to be recognized as human, waiting for the transplant to be accepted, waiting for the body to stop rejecting, waiting for the immune system to rest, waiting for the grey to become color again, and the waiting was long, and the grey was total, and the acceptance had not come, and the acceptance would not come, and the grey was everything, and the waiting was everything, and the everything was grey, and the grey was Dr. Rashid, and Dr. Rashid was the grey, and they were the same, and they were still waiting.