My dad stands when the national anthem plays at baseball games.
He removes his faded baseball cap. He faces the flag. He doesn’t sing.
“I stand,” he told me. “I’m proud of it.” But he worries that if he sings too loudly, someone might think he’s performing patriotism. If he stands too still, someone might question it. He wonders whether the people around him see sincerity or spectacle — whether they assume he’s “faking it” because he’s an immigrant. In a sea of jerseys and ball caps, his dark hair and tan complexion can set him apart — an immigrant from a part of the world the U.S. has long cast as its adversary.
Hayden Chedid and her dad at a Colorado Rockies game in Denver on Sept. 26, 2015. (Provided by Hayden Chedid)My father came to the United States from Syria decades ago. He left behind an authoritarian government and mandatory military service. He arrived still learning to speak English and with a conviction that if he worked hard enough, he could build a life untouched by the fear he grew up with.
“America was just perfect for me,” he said. Education, a stable job, a family, a house. “That’s exactly what I’m having.”
He reveres the metaphor of the melting pot. “I love the idea. It’s wonderful.” Even as newer metaphors for immigration — mosaics, tapestries — have replaced it in much of the national conversation, he still believes in disappearing into something larger. When I asked if he wanted to melt in, he didn’t hesitate: “Yes, 100%.” Assimilation, he told me, “was an achievement.” A necessity.
But you can call somewhere home and still be reminded you arrived there.
Officially “Other”
For most of his adult life, my father checked “Other” on government forms. Under federal guidelines established in 1997, people with origins in the Middle East and North Africa are classified as white. Legally, he is white.“I never considered myself white,” he said. “I always felt I’m more brown or Middle Eastern in my heart.”
That classification has long been contested. Arab immigrants once fought for nominal whiteness to secure citizenship; today, it often obscures more than it protects. Research shows it masks disparities, from higher poverty rates to workplace discrimination. If Arab Americans are white on paper, they’re not treated that way in practice.
At times, the designation has offered partial access to belonging, smoothing assimilation in ways other groups have not experienced. But that belonging is conditional. When conflict resurfaces in the Middle East, it quickly erodes.
Amid the Iran war, that fragility is exposed. Since late February, Islamophobic rhetoric online has surged, with tens of thousands of posts targeting Muslims and those perceived to be Middle Eastern, amplified widely through social media. On campuses and in communities, fear has intensified — for family abroad and for safety at home.
My dad knows that tension well. “I’ve never been treated as white,” he said. About 30 years ago, not long after he came to Colorado, he was pulled over by the Glendale police. The officer asked where he was from. After he answered Syria, the officer joked about searching his car for bombs. He insists those incidents were rare — “Really, 99.9% of people were wonderful” — but he remembers how it felt. “Yes, I felt less of an American.”
I’ve heard this story many times since the age of 11. Back then, I didn’t have the language for it — I just remember feeling confused, betrayed that the world could see my dad as something suspect when, to me, he was just my dad. I hear the story differently now. I’ve learned how quickly belonging can be stripped down to a question, how a single interaction can redraw the boundaries of who gets to feel at home.
And yet, he resists being labeled a minority. He does not want special consideration. “It’s good to be categorized with white because I like to compete on equal footing,” he said.
His desire to blend in, he told me, was “purely self-motivated — to live a better life.” He shortened his first name to make it easier for people to pronounce. He worked diligently to adjust his accent. “To have a better life, you have to adapt.”
The contradiction lives comfortably inside him. “I’m proud to be Syrian. I’m proud to be Arab,” he said. “I will never let go of that.”
But he wants the stability historically attached to whiteness in America. He wants to be American without qualification — without suspicion.
Growing up, I learned to read that contradiction not as hypocrisy, but as strategy — a way to navigate a country that offers belonging unevenly. I’ve always understood his pride. I’m not sure I’ve ever fully understood the trade-offs.
The melting pot has expanded
Hilary Falb Kalisman, an associate professor at CU Boulder and historian of the modern Middle East, told me that racial categories have always been unstable, even when they appear fixed.
“The fact that those categories are kind of flawed and don’t really work doesn’t mean that they’re not significant in understanding people’s perceptions of themselves,” she said.
Even so, those categories continue to shape who is seen as belonging and who is not. The melting pot has expanded over time to include once-excluded Europeans — Irish, Italians, Eastern Europeans — folding them into American whiteness. But others remain in a liminal space, close enough to be counted as white, far enough to be questioned.
In moments of geopolitical tension, that ambiguity sharpens. The result is a peculiar form of American Otherness: legally included, socially conditional.
Moving through the world as white
That in-between space is where meaning is made, said Samira Rajabi, an assistant professor at the University of Colorado who studies media and identity.
Rajabi, who uses the phrase “hybrid Iranian American” to describe herself, grew up in Colorado in a household where Farsi was spoken and Iranian television flickered through a satellite dish. It was a bridging of two worlds — one inherited and one inhabited.
When people feel “in between,” she explained, they search for others who share their testimony. Meaning is produced collectively—through shared grief, shared memory, shared recognition. But recognition is uneven.
“It honestly feels really, really dehumanizing to be Iranian at this moment,” she said, pointing to the war. The Middle East is frequently treated as a monolith, flattened through an Orientalist lens that erases cultural and political distinctions and reduces millions of people to a geopolitical problem.
Recognition, she says, requires more than visibility. “To be legible among people that might understand your grief is different than being visible.”
Listening to her, I turned inward. I don’t appear typically Middle Eastern — I move through the world as white. People don’t see the proximity I feel to the conflict, nor do they register the weight it carries in my family or the way it reshapes conversations at home. The kind of recognition Rajabi describes becomes complicated when your identity isn’t visible.
The American flag flying outside of Hayden Chedid’s dad’s home. (Provided by Hayden Chedid)When anti-immigrant sentiment dominated presidential election headlines in 2023, my dad put an American flag outside our house in Parker for the first time. Part of it, he admitted, was strategic—protection, a signal of belonging. But when a contractor stopped by and noticed the flag, the conversation shifted. They talked about the country, about pride. The man listened to my dad’s accent and didn’t flinch.
“He was proud that I was proud of America, too,” my dad said.
In that exchange, the flag became less of a shield and more of a bridge. For a moment, belonging felt reciprocal.
At baseball games, he still stands for the anthem. He still doesn’t sing. But when he votes, he told me, he feels “fully American.” He cherishes the Stars and Stripes. He is proud of the life he built.
But he also knows what it means to be asked, “Where are you really from?” To feel eyes linger a second too long — to be legally white and socially Other.
The melting pot promises transformation, that difference will dissolve into unity. My father built his life on that promise.
Yet even as he melts in, something visible, accented and slightly out of place remains.
As his daughter, I’ve inherited both sides of that reality — the belonging he built and the distance he learned to ignore.
And so at baseball games, when the anthem plays and the stadium stands as one, my dad stands too — steady, silent and still negotiating what it means to belong.
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