Growing up poor and brown in America is an unbearable weight. From the moment of your birth, you feel the hands around your throat. You can never really breathe. The only way to be free is to die and even that is a defeat, because that is how this nation wants from us: Brown bodies. Dead bodies. We’re welfare queens, drug addicts, illegals, terrorists, unwanted. Just bodies, not people. Never people. If we live, they exploit us and terrorize us. If we die, so what?

My white professor tells our class we don’t know what it’s like not to be free because we’re in America and she taught in Panama once and the government censored everything. Every other Muslim I know who talks about this stuff has their phone tapped. I don’t know if mine is. I don’t know if I want to know. My friends die at the hands of the police, or they die because they never went to college, never even made it out of high school, and got into drug running instead. I’ve had two friends kill themselves because they saw the cycle and saw no way out, no future for any of us. This country’s soldiers kill people who look like me on the evening news and call it heroism. Whenever I see a policeman I tense up because I don’t know if they’re going to pull me to the side of the street and interrogate me about drugs, about if I’m a prostitute, about what I’m doing in this neighborhood in these clothes when I look like a brown girl with an attitude problem. I don’t know if they’re going to arrest me. If they arrest me I don’t know if I’ll come back alive and unharmed to my family. I listen to customers at work crack jokes to my face about my accent, my religion, my body. In this country I’m wrong. In this country I’m disposable.

If this is America’s freedom, I don’t want it.