Melissa
Bowie, MD

It wasn’t until I moved to the DMV (the Washington DC metro area, for the uninitiated), that I began to chafe under assumed ethnic identities. I have great examples: waiting for the metro and a metro employee sings the “Mexican Hat Dance” behind me; taking my (blonde) kids to the park and having the other moms assume I am the nanny; an Egyptian man talking to me about “people like us.” It really came to the fore for me when I tried to board a specially chartered plane bound for Poland but operated by El-Al, the Israeli airline. I was stopped, over and over again, at each checkpoint just trying to get to the plane. I was questioned; I was sequestered. I was under intense scrutiny. Finally, I simply asked: why me? The young guard looking over my passport said: “You look like you have an ‘ambiguous ethnic origin.'”