NPR Journalist Recounts Experience Covering Campaigns As Visibly Muslim Woman
Asma Khalid is, according to her employee profile on the National Public Radio website, “a campaign reporter focusing on the intersection of demographics and politics in the 2016 election.” Khalid is a Muslim woman who wears a hijab, so to cover the intersection of demographics and politics in a campaign season that included calls for bans on Muslims entering the country, talk of Muslim registries, and widespread Islamophobia couldn’t have been easy. Today, she published a piece about the experience.
You know an article is going to reveal some harrowing details when there is a footnote that says, “The author chose to use only first names of people mentioned because the intent of the piece is not to publicly shame anyone.”
She revealed that she persevered as people hurled slurs at her at rallies and campaign events because “the story of Donald Trump’s America is not some foreign story of a faraway place; it’s [her] homeland.” In the country she described as her homeland, a woman she met on the campaign trail screamed at her to get off her property when she was interviewing her family members on the porch. A different man took it upon himself to tell her why a ban on Muslims would be beneficial to her: It would keep her out of an internment camp, which he saw as an eventuality if more Muslims were to come into the United States.
In spite of trying hard to be empathetic and make people comfortable with her, she admitted to simply removing her headscarf a few times to “incognito” and avoid the vitriol. She explained that she had to go to great lengths to get certain voters to trust her.
“No doubt, for many folks, particularly [Donald] Trump voters, I was the first Muslim they had ever met,” she wrote.
Her experiences didn’t only take place in person, though; she wrote about the racist attacks that flooded her Twitter mentions, most of which she didn’t acknowledge because she knew her mother read her feed.
Read the entire thing here.
[image: screengrab]
