A Season of Terror and Donald Trump
In mid-September, Rafia Zakaria, a Pakistani-American lawyer and writer, flew to Denver, to attend the annual conference of the Online News Association, where she was to present a paper on hate directed at American Muslims. She carried “Black Flags,” Joby Warrick’s account of the rise of ISIS, to read on the plane. Worried that passengers might be alarmed if they saw a South Asian woman engrossed in that book, she’d wrapped it in the floral cover of “Georgia,” Dawn Tripp’s novel about Georgia O’Keeffe. That is the sort of “passing,” Zakaria says, that many American Muslims engage in “to appear to be unthreatening” in this season of terror and Donald Trump.