Life as a triple threat
If I could describe my existence from the perspective of my classmates growing up with one word, it would be confusing. I am Black, but I am also a woman, and since my junior year of high school, also a hijabi. I am what my friends jokingly call a triple threat. Each of those pieces of my identity comes with its own struggle — but also unique beauty.
The day I realized I was never going to be seen the same way as my white friends was in the seventh grade, when some kid in my social studies class made a comment about my skin. He said, very simply, “You’re so dark.” A man of many words.
He barely knew who I was, and I didn’t know who he was either. I realized that while in my eyes he was just another white kid in a school full of white kids, to him, I was that one Black girl. I finally understood why Nathan from Mr. Mackenzie’s second period social studies class would never wonder what I liked to do for fun.
I understood prejudice at a young age — which was a common occurrence in my life. Up to that point, and for a long time after that, I had heard it all. Until that one off comment, I hadn’t grasped that before anyone cared to get to know who I was, the first thing they would see was my race, and how different it was. To say the least, it drastically affected how they interacted with me — especially in Gilbert, Arizona. My personality, or anything else about me didn’t matter. I was simply an enigma. A science experiment to poke and prod and test the limits of. A museum exhibit to stare at.
From then on, I noticed how differently my peers treated me, even before I started wearing the hijab. To me, the worst of it wasn’t even the blatantly prejudiced or ignorant comments — someone even asked me if my box braids grew out of my head that way — but how people tiptoed around me. They were a little too polite, in a way that felt like overcompensation. I just wanted them to treat me like they would anyone else while appreciating my differences.
I was slowly learning that no matter how I present myself, depending on where I am, people will always see me as Black first, or a woman first, or Muslim first — never a person that was all three and more than that. In high school, they saw me as a confusing representation of everything foreign they didn’t understand. After I started wearing the hijab, I was told numerous times that I “couldn’t be Muslim because I was Black.”
In Muslim spaces, while not so severely, my family was also the minority. While my mosque was an amalgamation of so many different cultures and countries, there weren’t so many African Muslim families where we lived. There were a couple of instances where people assumed my mom was a cleaning lady — like Aisha, the older Senegalese woman who cleaned the mosque in my community out of the kindness of her own heart, and that my parents could speak Wolof with.
The intersection of my identities make them each more complicated than if I was the perceived “default” of each — for instance, a white woman. When learning about the history of Black people in America, it was important for me to learn that Black women are not afforded the same courtesies as white women in this country or anywhere, and that being a hijabi also added on to that disparity — especially in spaces like healthcare and the workplace. But that’s a topic that deserves an article of its own.
My takeaways from my experiences as a Black hijabi are, one: that a large part of prejudice is simply ignorance. So many people simply don’t know much about the history of Black people in America, Islam, Africa or even the difference between race, ethnicity and nationality. As for the second takeaway, while my life and identity can be complicated, I would never trade it for the world.
I love who I am. I love that I am the only person in the continental United States named Penda Ba. I love that sometimes I struggle to match my hijab to the rest of my outfit and that my family eats together from a big, intricately designed Mauritanian plate on the floor of the living room instead of the table. I love learning how to ask for more rice in my Muslim friends’ native languages. I love my parents’ tea addiction and my brother’s basketball shoe collection, and going to the mosque every Friday, and not celebrating Christmas, and my family’s frantic rush to get ready and leave the house in the morning on Eid. I love watching cartoons with my brothers for hours while my mom braids my hair, screaming Playboi Carti lyrics with my friends and all the little things about who I am that to so many people, are so different and confusing.
While I look back at the journey I took to get to this point of completely loving my identity and feeling supported in it, this Black History Month — and World Hijab Day — I am also thinking of all the other Black American hijabis who are on the same path. Don’t forget to hug your Black friends, Happy Black History Month and remember that we are all more than what we present to be.