Microaggressions I faced at Juice Jam reflect Islamophobia at SU

After days of students anticipating Jack Harlow’s hazy, dreamy presence on campus — even though the majority didn’t even recognize his gratuitous verse in “Already Best Friends” — everyone mobilized and cosplayed to be a Harlow fan for Syracuse University’s music festival, Juice Jam. 

I spent days outfit planning, becoming a master of color theory while employing my scholarship in blending fashion with persona, producing one of my favorite looks and then sharing captures of it on Instagram. I posed, vogued and walked with my navy blue oversized cargos, multilayered turtlenecks — bottom layer is pistachio green and the top is purple and green — sleeves covering my hands with film captures of trees, topped off with my green Hijab and Champion green bucket hat. 

I am a Hijabi Muslim, and you’re probably wondering how that is remotely relevant to Juice Jam. Being visibly Muslim, however, comes with its burdens and public assumptions, especially at SU. Without any justification, people see my Hijab and activate all of their predetermined prejudices and Islamophobia. 

Upon entering Juice Jam, there was a security checkpoint. Everyone was body-scanned and quickly moved through the rest of the process. Other people were not being touched by the security guard. You can probably tell where I’m going with this. It was my turn to get checked, and for an oblivious, naive second, I thought the world might not be so terrible and assumed the security checkpoint would go smoothly for me, just like it did for everyone else. 

I transiently forgot that my Hijab precedes my name on this campus. 

The security guard body scanned me, and I thought it would end there. Instead, she reached for my bucket hat and tried to remove it. When I asked her what she was doing, she asked if I could remove my bucket hat and “what’s under it,” referring to my Hijab. That part in itself was a microaggression wrapped under another, until I said that I could not remove my bucket hat. It was holding my Hijab. And I could not remove my Hijab, for obvious reasons that I shouldn’t have had to explain. The security guard proceeded to condescendingly laugh, then use her hands to pat all over my bucket hat, and even reached under my Hijab and patted my hair. 

             Let that settle within you for a second or two. 

Even Transportation Security Administration (TSA), notoriously known for its Islamophobia and anti-Muslim agenda — holding me up for hours at security for no “apparent” reason — have never reached under my Hijab, with their bare hands, to check underneath.

These “incidents” occur so often I feel to some degree, no matter how outraged I am, numb. In a post-9/11 sense of the world, or as the media knows it to be “Muslim Terrorist Attacks,” I am nothing but a vestle to carry bombs in my backpack and explosive chemicals under my Hijab until I don’t recognize myself outside of America’s “never forget” sphere. While Americans need a reminder, I don’t get the choice to forget, because 9/11 became the plotline for my life before I was even born, before I was even a concept.

In today’s sense of the world, as known on this campus to be diversity and inclusion, my Hijab is not really a threat until I go through security checks for an event, or until the Department of Public Safety stops me multiple times asking why I look “unwell,” “concerned” or “suspicious.” My Hijab is not really a threat to be particular but a thing — a thing to be removed at security checks, patted up for American safety, and patted down to avoid a lawsuit, and before I know it, my whole being becomes that thing. The thing people refuse to even call the correct term: a Hijab. 

Being a Hijabi Muslim on this campus is 30 pounds added to my already strained neck and backpack-broken shoulders. And my backpack isn’t heavy because I’m hiding a bomb in it, but because I overspent at the Campus Store on healing, revolution, poetry books and journals, and now I carry them everywhere I go. I also have my electronics, one earring, my sister’s picture, an empty water bottle, Sephora’s Cheirosa 62 perfume and a shea butter lip balm. 

But whether I like it or not, my existence in itself is political and is uncomfortable to the norms this campus was built on. So my question is, how much longer are we going to scream, “Not Again, SU” but have our voices be nothing but a faded echo in the background of this campus’ policy making and so-called Office of Diversity and Inclusion?

I wanted my Sunday to be about fashion, singing “Already Best Friends” with Jack Harlow and good company — not another protest, not another political statement.

Zainab Altuma (Almatwari) ‘24