When I asked Asma if she ever felt a distinct I-don’t-belong feeling, she knew exactly what I meant. When they first arrived in the new town, Asma’s parents enrolled her in a summer program. Breakfast was served, and she declined to eat the pork sausage. Other kids stared in awe at this stranger, with her clipped vowels and dietary restrictions.

“I’m Muslim,” she explained, and would continue to explain when kids asked why her family didn’t celebrate Christmas, or why she wasn’t eating during Ramadan, or why her mom wore a hijab.

“What church do you go to?” they’d say, as many good Southerners do upon meeting a stranger. Asma would patiently explain the difference between Christians and Muslims. People would tell her that she needed Jesus, and Asma would politely demur.

After 9/11, her difference seemed to harden, in the eyes of her neighbors, into outright deviance. Research has shown that crises like armed conflicts make groups cohere more firmly.156 Under threat, groups enforce their norms more strictly and punish those who violate them more severely. After 9/11, being unlike all the white Christians in multiple ways wasn’t an easy way for Asma to be.

One kid asked Asma if her father was a terrorist and if she knew when the next attack would be. On the attack’s one-year anniversary, her class had to sing “God Bless the U.S.A.,” and Asma got the sense that the patriotic zeal wasn’t meant to include people like her. In the wake of the tragedy, Asma’s realization of her own distinctiveness happened over and over again.

It wasn’t just being Muslim that made her stand out. She wasn’t like the Christian kids, but she wasn’t exactly like the other black kids, either. She felt like many people in her town accepted her, a smart black kid who used stereotypically “white” diction, but not the other black kids, many of whom were growing up in poverty. On some level, Asma sensed that it would behoove her to preserve her newscaster-neutral accent, to be the kind of kid that adults liked.

Asma is still Facebook friends with some of the locals from that town, and she’s sometimes puzzled by the town’s cognitive dissonance. Some people there wish President Trump would keep all the Muslims out one minute, while wishing her well on her endeavors the next.

In high school, Asma served as a kind of assistant for one of her teachers, helping him with administrative work during her free period. He was a quirky man, and many of the oddball students gravitated toward him. He was kind to Asma, and they had an easy, comfortable relationship.