Naïve, Overeducated, and Unemployed . . . in a Post-9/11 World A young Muslim American woman discovers others’ perceptions of her community By Melody Moezzi After over a month of unemployment following my graduation from law school, I finally broke down. The guilt associated with still using my parents’ American Express card while watching my husband head dutifully to work every weekday morning ultimately got the better of me, and I decided that I had to get a job, no matter how demeaning. I had fully intended to enter the non-profit world and do public interest law following graduation, but after applying to nearly every relevant public interest job I could find in the Atlanta area and consistently getting rejected for my alleged inexperience, I realized that even these notoriously thankless and embarrassingly low-paying jobs required more experience than I had managed to gather over the past several years. Apparently the fact that I had led and founded several activist groups over the past ten years didn’t count as experience because I wasn’t paid to do so. “Who the hell pays you to lead protests and demonstrations?” I finally asked one of my rejecters over the phone. “The only time I’ve ever been offered money was to shut up and leave, which I never did. Isn’t that worth something to you? Shouldn’t that mean a lot to a supposedly humanitarian organization claiming to fight poverty?” Unsurprisingly, she proceeded to hang up on me, and I proceeded to lose faith in the so-called non-profit sector. Unlike my classmates who spent their summers working in law firms or in other law-related internships, I took to spending my summers on a single unpaid and in fact costly task: writing a controversial book about young Muslim Americans, a book for which I only recently received a contract and for which I have thus far only received enough payment to compensate me for about half of the travel expenses I incurred in order to write it. If writing this book has taught me one practical lesson, it has been that writing pays shit. Imagine: all I had to do was devote several years of my life, my body, my soul, my every breath, to writing this book, and as my financial reward, I can expect to get a whopping 7.5% of its sales. Of course, the spiritual rewards are endless. Still, I have a mortgage, two cats, and a terrible shopping habit. All signs seem to point toward one painful reality: I need to find a “real” job. Given the fact that I have devoted eight years of my life along with an obscene amount of my parents’ money to obtaining a higher education, which includes a Masters in Public Health along with a Juris Doctor, I feel a serious pressure and obligation to use at least one of these degrees in order to generate a respectable income. As it turns out, however, my actual work experience in either the field of law or public health has been highly limited thanks to the time-consuming nature of my less than lucrative literary efforts of late. ___________________________ Being the inexperienced professional I was, I had the sincere, though misguided, belief that no one would even think of discriminating against me. ___________________________ So, there I was and there I remain: with a résumé fat with publications and slim on any “real” work experience. On top of that, it was clear from my résumé that I spoke Farsi, that I had been the president of my undergraduate Muslim Students Association, and that I had written a non-fiction book about Muslim Americans. It wouldn’t take much inferring to figure out that I was in fact Muslim from this résumé. Nevertheless, being the inexperienced professional I was, I had the sincere, though misguided, belief that no one would even think of discriminating against me on this basis. Thus I saw no reason to exclude these skills and experiences from my résumé, as I considered them valuable and relevant accomplishments. After weeks of trying and failing to procure a public interest job, however, I grew increasingly bitter and despondent. And ultimately, out of severe desperation and lack of foresight, I did the unthinkable: I applied for several firm jobs. Despite my severe distaste for law firms in general and the adversarial nature of the American judicial system in particular, I applied for a “law clerk” position listed on my law school’s career website. When a partner from the firm called me one morning, interrupting my embarrassingly captivated viewing of an America’s Next Top Model rerun marathon on VH1, I agreed to come in that afternoon for an interview. I couldn’t get myself to rationalize skipping the interview for the greatest vice of my generation, so I turned off the TV and set out to enter the land of the grown-ups: to get out of my pajamas and cross the invisible boundary that separated mindless consumption from equally mindless production. I had crossed this boundary before, but never wearing a suit. I had only hitherto crossed it as a lowly laborer: a cashier, a waitress, a hostess, a barista. That day marked my first entrance into the professional world as a bona fide lawyer. It was destined for disaster. I knew I would be walking into a small firm, but I didn’t realize exactly how small. The “law firm” was about the size of my 750 square foot condo, and the entire firm consisted of a father and his son. I would be interviewing with Dad. As I walked into the “firm,” I saw an old white man in a short-sleeved Aloha print shirt walking around talking on a cordless phone. He looked at me and mouthed the words, “Give me a second,” and I realized that Aloha Dad was in fact my interviewer. I sat down in the chair that he motioned toward and waited for him to get off the phone. Though initially a bit shocked by his appearance, I was pleased at the seemingly casual nature of the work environment. When he got off the phone, he came up to me, shook my hand standing way too close, and asked me to follow him into the “conference room” two feet behind us. We sat down at a large mahogany table (apparently the only absolute necessity for any law firm) and he asked me for my résumé, saying that he had lost the first one that I had sent him. ___________________________ Though initially a bit shocked by his appearance, I was pleased at the seemingly casual nature of the work environment. ___________________________ As I handed him another copy of my résumé, I began to fully realize the excessively casual nature of his attire - in addition to being short-sleeved and untucked, his aloha print shirt was unbuttoned to his belly button. His mess of black and gray chest hair prominently displayed above a disconcertingly large and protruding basketball belly. I refused to allow myself to get distracted and still tried to interpret his casual, though bordering on revolting, appearance to be a positive sign. After all, it’s not like he had a giant gold chain or any visible tattoos. It turned out that Aloha Dad was even less prepared for this interview than I was. Apparently not knowing what to do after I handed him my résumé, he just slapped it down on the mahogany table and began reading aloud - skipping roughly every other line or so and asking for my occasional commentary on my own résumé. After a few minutes, he landed on the “language skills” section and he looked at me. “You speak Spanish and Portuguese.” There was nothing interrogative about this statement, but I interrupted solely for clarification. “No, actually, I speak Spanish and Farsi.” “Yes, Spanish and Portuguese?” “No,” I repeated, “Spanish and Farsi.” “Well what’s that?” he asked, visibly confused if not annoyed. “Um,” I responded, kind of taken aback but determined to remain in interview mode, “they speak it in Iran and parts of Afghanistan, Tajikistan, and Azerbaijan.” Then he reached the writing section of my résumé, just as I had managed to rationalize his insistence that I spoke Portuguese. I imagined he might have been rightfully confused because I look Hispanic and speak Spanish, and I decided to give him the benefit of the doubt. A benefit that he quickly proceeded to annihilate in one fell swoop. He read back to me the portion of my résumé detailing the summers and vacations that I had spent writing the abovementioned book about young Muslim Americans. Then, having proven to me that he could in fact read, he looked at me again and asked, “Are you Moslem?” And yes, he pronounced it “Moslem.” I paused and looked back at him, waiting fairly patiently for him to recognize the inappropriateness of his question on his own. When it quickly became obvious that no such recognition was approaching, I simply answered the question, desperately trying to maintain my composure: “Yes.” “Did you have anything to do with nine-eleven?” I immediately began to laugh. Did he really just ask that? He couldn’t have. It had to be a joke, certainly a bit off-color, but still just a joke, right? Wrong. He looked straight into my eyes as I stopped laughing, actually waiting for an answer. He wasn’t laughing, and then, he did it again before I could fully gather my thoughts: “No, seriously, did you?” “Um, no I didn’t” was my shocked and pathetic reply. Since then, I have compiled a series of late come-backs that I could have employed but didn’t: “Yes, in fact I was the master-mind behind it all;” “No, I was kind of busy with law school at the time;” “Naturally, would you like me to get you free signed photos of Osama bin Laden for you and your son?;” and then of course there are the countless unique constructions consisting of some long string of my most favorite obscenities thoughtfully arranged to adequately convey my varied emotional responses. The possible constructions I have since pondered seem endless, but the fact is that I managed to remain calm throughout the rest of the interview, so much so that Aloha Dad even offered me the job on the spot. ___________________________ “Would you like me to get you free signed photos of Osama bin Laden for you and your son?” ___________________________ Still in shock, I responded to the offer instinctively by asking about the pay, not thinking that there would be no amount of money that would get me to come back there, and he asked me what I was looking for. I told him the truth: simply that I had been told that the standard pay should be around $25-$30 an hour. He further insulted me by saying that he couldn’t offer more than $14-$15 an hour. I told him that I would consider it, and I emailed him the next day courteously rejecting his offer. Driving home from the interview, the absolute absurdity of Aloha Dad began to sink in. After cursing myself for not telling him off, I called my law school’s career resource center from the car, informing them in a voicemail that they should no longer list this man’s positions on their website given his incredible knack for all things inappropriate. After that, stuck in the all-too-predictable hell of late afternoon Atlanta traffic, I think I called about fifteen of my friends, just to confirm my suspicions that all of this was in fact inexcusably inappropriate. Being a lawyer, I knew that I had no legal cause of action against this man or his “firm,” and while I would never bother suing for something like this, I couldn’t help initially viewing the situation from a purely legal perspective. And having been offered the job, this perspective left me with nothing, as under the law, I would have had to prove that I was denied employment because of the employer’s discriminatory acts and that I suffered damages resulting from that denial. After doing a quick intake of this and any other potential legal issues, I quickly realized how useless and irrelevant the law was here. The legal analysis didn’t matter for shit. A degree in molecular genetics or astrophysics would have served me better. What mattered here was the human analysis. This wasn’t the first time I had faced this kind of ignorance: I had in fact been noticing it on my television almost every day since September 11, 2001. It had invaded so many of my conversations, as well as those of others around me. It had managed to spoil one of my favorite pastimes: eavesdropping. The joy of being an objective observer, of “overhearing” others’ conversations, proceeded to wane as I began to increasingly find myself in these conversations. Any reference to the Middle East, to the so-called “War on Terror,” to Islam or the “Islamic world” would remind me of my status as a misunderstood minority in my own homeland. Still, most of these comments were veiled in an attempt to maintain political correctness to a certain degree. Aloha Dad, however, made no attempt at political correctness. His comments made the level of his ignorance strikingly clear to me. They required no digging; they spoke for themselves. Thus, in a way, he did me a courtesy by refusing to disguise his bigotry in more palatable language. Had he been less obvious, I may have made the mistake of taking the job and not realizing until a month into it that I was working for a moron and a bigot. ___________________________ Any reference to the Middle East, to the so-called “War on Terror,” to Islam or the “Islamic world” would remind me of my status as a misunderstood minority in my own homeland. ___________________________ Today, some three months later, I am still unemployed, and after many interviews, I continue to refuse to revise my résumé. I refuse to exclude from my leadership experience the fact that I was president of the Wesleyan University Muslim Students Association for two years, along with the fact that I have written this book about Muslim Americans and that I happen to speak fluent Farsi. I have little doubt that wearing my religious identity on my résumé has cost me certain job opportunities, but I’ve come to the admittedly premature conclusion that I would have been miserable at those jobs, that I would have incurred more mental health-related costs (therapy, shopping, etc.) as a result of working those jobs than I would have made by working there, that I would have become a monster and a sellout at those jobs. Of course, I realize that I can rationalize my unemployment for only so long, but for now, I am managing. I am getting paid a little bit for my writing these days, and I have since retired my parents’ AmEx, which sits in a block of ice in a cup in our freezer along with two other credit cards of my own. I’m not expecting this whole “War on Terror” thing to just quietly blow over, but I’m hoping that by refusing to censor my identity and accomplishments for mere comfort’s sake, I can manage to maintain my self-respect while still eventually finding suitable employment along the way. At present, I spend many of my days writing in a local coffee shop housed in a former industrial loft, where I often meet my husband for lunch. Such happens to be the case on this sunny, late September Tuesday afternoon. After we finish eating our matching hummus-veggie wraps and multicolored Terra chips, my husband picks up his Moroccan mint tea and announces his intention to return to work. He kisses my forehead and points to my sticker-laden laptop saying, “Get back to your non-traditional job.” I guess it will do for now. It’s not as if we don’t already have enough lawyers in this world. Melody Moezzi is the author of the nonfiction book “War on Error” about the lives of young Muslim Americans, excerpts of which have been published in Urban Mozaik as well as Parabola Magazine.  She is currently in between publishers and welcoming offers. Her website is www.melodymoezzi.com, and her email is melody@melodymoezzi.com.   This website: Copyright © 2006 Dream World Media, LLC. / Urban Mozaik Magazine. All rights reserved. The opinions expressed in Urban Mozaik Magazine are not necessarily those of Urban Mozaik Magazine and the publisher cannot be held responsible for them. This website/publication, in whole or in part, may not be reproduced without written permission from the publisher.