For Hina Uddin, the most prominent Muslim at Foster High School, senior year ended with a bang.

 

A popular American government teacher, the kind who lectures on what minorities in the outside world are “really” like instead of giving tests and homework, was fired.

 

“He handed out these flyers in one of his classes that said, ‘All Muslims want to do x, y, z.’ Things like ‘take down America,’ all this stuff basically, that wasn’t true and painted all Muslims as radical terrorists,” Uddin said.

 

When the flyers made their way to the principal’s office, the teacher was fired, and Uddin was to blame, even though she wasn’t even taking his class that semester.

 

“On social media there was this one kid who said, ‘This b-word is the one who got Wolverton fired.’ And it was a picture of me,” she said. “That had never happened to me before. I was a non-confrontational person. I’ve never been in a fight or an argument with anyone.”

 

Over a year later, the incident still bothers Uddin. Her classmates were kind and defensive of Uddin, but they continued to vouch for the Islamophobic government teacher.

 

“They thought the only problem with that moment were that the attacks were toward me,” she said. “The part that bothers me isn’t that one kid posted something about me on social media, it’s that so many people in my school still thought it was okay for him to voice his opinion, not facts, in class, in a school environment.”

 

Uddin, a second generation immigrant, lived in Houston for 18 years before the incident occurred. With a Pakistani father and an Indian mother, Uddin considers herself South Asian first, Muslim second, and everything else comes next.

 

“I guess the first thing I would place in my identity would be my ethnicity and my culture because being South Asian plays a really big part in my life,” she said. “I think being Muslim would be the second part of my identity. After that, I’m a student, a Cougar, a Houstonian, all the other things.”

 

Uddin juggles many identities -- she’s South Asian, American and Muslim, but she embraces what makes her culture different from what the majority of her small Texan town looked like, even though it made it a little harder to relate to other kids growing up.

 

“In Indian culture, it’s really common for parents and grandparents to live together. My grandparents live with me and it’s awesome and I love it, but that’s not something that’s common in American culture, which values the nuclear family,” she said. “Food of course, too. When I was younger, I would bring food in my lunchbox and it would not smell good. To me it did, but…. And now Indian food is all the rage. Back then, it really wasn’t.”

 

For Uddin personally, Islam is more a mindset and lifestyle than a religion.

“It impacts every part of my life,” she said. “I actively think about the way that I am around people because it’s part of my religion to always be kind to people. That’s something we believe the Prophet taught. I think about how I am with people and how I represent myself every day because I’m going to be seen as a Muslim.”