Seeing through Whiteness, Seeing through my Father
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While reading James Baldwin’s My Dungeon Shook: Letter to My Nephew, I heard my father's voice. My father, a brown Muslim man, spent his twenties in the UK, away from his family in Kuwait, who had just been exiled from Gaza. For my grandfather, It was a rare opportunity for him—a chance to escape the refugee camps and build a better life in an unfamiliar country that accepted teachers. When it was time for my father to attend university, he was limited; Kuwaiti universities were reserved for citizens, a status my family did not hold as Palestinian refugees. So, my father had only one option: to leave his home and pursue his education in the UK.
As a brown-skinned man with a foreign accent, he found himself navigating white spaces and trying to carve out a life. He had to assimilate to whiteness, studying hard to neutralize his accent, adopting white mannerisms, and constantly proving himself to his white peers.
Growing up as a Palestinian in the diaspora, I can still see traces of these behaviours. Don’t get me wrong—my father is a proud Palestinian Muslim who embraces his heritage and culture. Yet, there are moments, like when we walk down grocery aisles and don’t speak Arabic to avoid making the white people around us uncomfortable. Or when he consciously accents his English, showcasing that he, a brown man, speaks it fluently. At times, he even hesitates to identify as Palestinian around certain people.
It’s here that I see the connection to Baldwin’s words when he tells his nephew: “There is no reason for you to try to become like white people, and there is no basis whatever for their impertinent assumption that they must accept you” (22).
Like Baldwin, my father has had to accept the ignorance and racism of white people, because, tragically, the same force that drove my family out of Palestine—white supremacy—is what my father had to confront and assimilate to in order to survive in the Western world. White supremacy doesn’t always present itself in blatant ways, but it lingers in the quiet, daily struggles my father faces to be seen, to integrate, to be accepted, and to succeed.
At first, I heard my father’s voice in Baldwin’s letter. But as I write this, I realize that this letter isn’t written by him—it’s addressed to him. It’s what my father needed to hear all along.