I still want to believe the US can make good on its promises, and not just to me. But I regularly wake up covered in fresh egg, courtesy of the highest leader in our land

My father was scheduled to speak at a university in Chicago, but there were no flights. This was right after the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center, and commercial air travel was a mess. The nation had been, briefly, stranded on the Earth.

We lived in Minnesota. Chicago was a six-hour drive away and my father did not want to back out of his commitment. He would drive, he said.

My mother and I opposed this proposition. Around the United States, people who looked like us were hearing the words “go home”, “go back”, “get out of my country”. These phrases had been directed at us before, at school, in parking lots. A Sikh man had just been shot at a gas station in Arizona. An immigrant from Pakistan had been murdered in a Dallas grocery store.

Despite our concerns, my father felt like he should go. My mother sent me with him. The logic was that he would seem less suspicious, less threatening, with his daughter in tow. We left in the morning and drove out of town beneath a baby blue sky marked, here and there, by contrails. Both on the radio and between our seats, there was only one topic of conversation.

It was a message on behalf of all brown Americans: we are not the enemy, we are one of you, so please, don’t shoot

We stopped near Madison to fill up on gas and Diet Coke. The fuel station was run by people of south Asian descent. They had plastered their store with American flags. Where they had run out of actual, fabric flags, they had drawn their own with crayons on pieces of copy paper and taped them up on the wall. Under different circumstances, I might have found it gently comical, this overly patriotic display. But like everyone else, I was too racked with grief and shock to laugh at anything – and also, I could see it for what it was, because I was trying to project it, too, it was the reason I was riding in that car. It was a message on behalf of all brown Americans: we are not the enemy, we are one of you, so please, don’t shoot.

For people like me, at that moment, the flag was a signal and a shield. People like Donald Trump – when they aren’t strangling the poor thing while pantomiming a hug – roll Old Glory up and use it as a whip and a gag. If you or your ancestors didn’t come from the right place and you criticize America, well, then you’re ungrateful, possibly treasonous. You deserve whatever punishment comes your way. People like Trump stuff patriotism in your mouth not because they are patriotic, but to shut you up. They encourage others to roll up their flag and beat you with it, too.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘People like Trump stuff patriotism in your mouth not because they are patriotic, but to shut you up.’ Photograph: Yuri Gripas/Reuters

When I was a student at the University of Iowa, I was involved with the campus antiwar movement. My peers and I set up a tent city on our college lawn after the first bombs troubled the Tigris. Some nights, young men came by after their visits to the bars and harassed us. They would unironically blast songs such as Outkast’s Bombs Over Baghdad and Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the USA from their SUVs. They pelted us with eggs. They called me a towelhead and a sandnigger, they told me to “go home”, to “go back”. They told us that if we didn’t love this country, we should move to Iraq.

Of course we loved this country! That’s why we were out there in the first place. Have you ever passed a cold night in Iowa? We weren’t exactly working on our tans. I believe our attackers loved their country, too, though we had dramatically different ideas about how that love should manifest itself. We were out there splattered by frozen yolks, with hand warmers shoved down our pants, because we didn’t believe there was an honest reason for placing our fellow citizens in harm’s way. But in the aftermath of a devastating attack on the US, many people viewed any disagreement with government policy as unpatriotic.

As a nation, we went along with so much – with government surveillance, torture, no-fly lists and an actual Muslim registry. Resistance was offensive to some of my fellow students, particularly since so many young men and women in that region were among the first to raise their hands and fly across the sea on behalf of their injured nation. But resistance was also resisted because many people, after 9/11, understandably felt afraid.

I was afraid, too.

I am afraid again. The United States touts itself, or once did, as a land of immigrants, a republic ostensibly founded on egalitarian idealism, though we all know those ideals have largely only applied to a certain group of people. Fifteen years later, it is chilling to watch the president egging on the populace, encouraging them to chant for the banishment of an American citizen. In a truly egalitarian society of ideas, no one would think dissent is grounds for expulsion, whether that dissent comes from student activists or four freshman congresswomen.

Our history is littered with examples of the “real American” litmus test, that “with us or against us” mentality. During the Vietnam war, “America: Love It Or Leave It” bumper stickers graced countless Buicks and Chevrolets. I once worked on a student reporting project with some classmates at a truckstop, somewhere near the Iowa-Illinois border. At one point, I found myself alone and surrounded by drivers, two of them questioning if I was born in this country. “Are you from Baghdad?” one of them asked me. “Are you a spy?” I was rescued by the facility’s housekeeper. “She’s just a student,” she told them, rolling her eyes.

It is the world’s greatest understatement to say that America has not been good to everyone, yet America has been pretty good to my family and to me. America drives me crazy, it breaks my heart every single day. It’s like being in love with someone who doesn’t love you as much as you love them. And still, I adore this country so much. I still want to believe it can make good on its promises, and not just to me. But I regularly wake up covered in fresh egg, courtesy of the highest leader in our land.

America drives me crazy, it breaks my heart every single day. It’s like being in love with someone who doesn’t love you as much as you love them

How am I supposed to cope when the president of the United States can’t look at me or my family without seeing a stranger, a threat? How do I cope when, decade after decade, most of the country still sees me that way, too, when they don’t think I am truly American? Throughout my life, I have frequently been confronted with a particular question and its echo. “Where are you from?” someone will ask me. “Minnesota,” I’ll say. “But where are you really from?” they’ll ask again. I was born here, I feel American.

But will America ever see me the way I see myself? As my father and I drove back from Chicago the next evening, all those years ago, the world grew dark. We had left the hotel a little too late. Somewhere between one pasture and the next, we both had to pee. Up on a hill in the distance, no more than a mile off the highway, was a rest stop. A single vehicle paused there beneath bright lights that cut the night.

We considered it, then decided to hold on and roll on, toss our dice at another station, somewhere closer to the road, somewhere with more patrons, more witnesses, somewhere we might be seen as just another family participating in one of the most American traditions of all, pouring ourselves a cup of stale coffee before taking to the open road in search of the United States.