“People’s discomfort is theirs and not mine,” she said. The way she sees it, if someone judges you for your choices, it implies they’re the ones who aren’t okay.

This attitude has manifested itself in Asma’s comfort with other people’s discomfort. Social anxiety often surfaces as a fear of authority figures, but Asma has no problem telling her boss that, say, she needs two more weeks to finish a project, or with correcting someone who mispronounces her name. She’s unperturbed by the idea that someone might be frustrated with or puzzled by her for a moment—she’s been putting up with that her whole life.

I asked her if she’d like to return to a place like her Southern hometown one day. She told me she did find it borderline “irresponsible” to live in a place like New York, where there’s a black Muslim on nearly every block. (Literally, Asma knew of another one who lived across the street and even had her same nose piercing.) Asma thinks that because she’s proven so capable at making a good life for herself no matter where she lives, “it seems like I should take some of that energy elsewhere.”

Someone once told her, “You should try and locate yourself at the most hardcore place where you can still sustain yourself,” she said, “and I think that’s sort of what I’m looking for.”

If you’re born and raised to be a nonconformist, she figures, you might as well go to the places that will test your mettle.

Chapter 9

Better Than the Rest

Michele

When Michele Roberts came home to her family’s apartment in a Bronx low-income housing development one day in 1970, her mother, Elsie, had some news for her. When she entered tenth grade the following year, Michele would be attending an elite boarding school for girls located about fifteen miles away.

Michele was angry. She was a strong student, but she had wanted to go to a science magnet school closer to her home. But there was no sense arguing with her mother. Michele had earned a scholarship, so away to the boarding school she went.

Michele remembers being one of five black girls in the school, and that there were no black teachers. She had nothing in common with the other students. For some of them, the only black people they had ever met were those that worked for their families. Some of the girls asked to stroke her hair.

Michele was consumed with the sense that she didn’t belong. Even the teachers questioned her abilities: when she did well on a paper, one asked, “Did you really write this?”