Growing up, in Maplewood, New Jersey, where her father was a narcotics detective and her mother a special-education teacher, Ibtihaj Muhammad competed in softball, tennis, volleyball, and track. “In our family, you didn’t have a choice of whether to play sports,” she told me. “You only had a choice of what sports you played.” The family philosophy was that athletics enabled the four girls and one son to better confront discrimination.

Double discrimination, actually. “We’re African-American and we’re Muslim,” Ibtihaj’s mother, Inayah Muhammad, told me. “I’m an educator. I know how important it is for kids to be a part of the community. Sports helps them integrate. Families and fans always unite around teams.”

But, for the girls, team uniforms didn’t cover hair or bodies, as required by their faith. Instead of shorts, Ibtihaj (whose name means “Joy”) wore baggy sweatpants for tennis and track, long loose shirts and leggings for volleyball, and a head scarf, known as a hijab, for them all. She was frequently teased, sometimes harassed. Then, when she was twelve, she and her mother happened to drive past a local high school and saw, through the windows of the cafeteria, students engaging in an unfamiliar sport.

“I didn’t know what it was,” her mother recalled. “But I knew how they were dressed.” The girls wore full-body suits, and helmets that covered their hair. The sport was fencing, and Ibtihaj—her friends call her Ibti—began competing at thirteen. “I’m not sure I fell in love with it at first,” she said. “But I’m really goal-oriented. And when you come from a large family you have to be creative about getting scholarships to college.” She helped her high-school team win two state championships. She still had a hard time winning public acceptance, however.

“When I was young, fencing was a white sport in New Jersey,” she said. “Not many people looked like me. There were no role models. When I competed in local tournaments, there were often comments about me—being black, or being Muslim. It hurt.” She was in advanced-placement English class, in high school, on September 11, 2001. After the second tower of the World Trade Center fell, teachers were instructed to turn off the televisions. Her brother and other Muslim boys were taken from their classrooms to another part of the school. “We still don’t know why,” she told me. “That night, there was panic in my house.”

Her mother recalled, “9/11 impacted everyone. The children were ostracized and targeted. People shouted at me when I drove down the street.”

For college, Muhammad looked at ten universities with fencing programs that could provide financial support. She ended up on a partial academic scholarship at Duke, where she specialized in the sabre and was named All-American three times. A torn hand ligament prevented her from qualifying for the 2012 Olympic team, but she recovered and has since won several medals, including a team silver medal at a World Cup event, in 2013, and a team gold medal at the World Fencing Championship in Russia, in 2014. In January, she qualified for this year’s Summer Olympics, in Rio de Janeiro. She’ll be the first Muslim American Olympian to compete wearing a hijab.

Muhammad’s refusal to be limited by what she wears also turned her into an entrepreneur. Two years ago, she and her siblings launched Louella, a clothing line named after their grandmother. She designs; her brother runs production out of Los Angeles. The clothes, some of which she models in Instagram posts, are a mixture of elegant and hip—loose-fitting tunics in rich colors over skinny jeans. They could sell at Chico’s. In the catalogue, some women wear a hijab, others don’t. In 2015, Louella released what Muhammad called the “Modesty” sweatshirt, inscribed in gold with the motto “Everything Is Better in Hijab.”

Her achievements have not eased the challenges. “I’ve flown to domestic competitions,” Muhammad said, “and T.S.A. agents at airports have spoken to me in demeaning ways, as if I’m foreign, because I wear hijab: ‘Do—you—speak—English?’

“How do people like this exist?” she asked, more in disbelief than in anger. “I’m productive, educated, and representing my country at the Olympics, but they question where I belong.” She continued, “People regularly avoid eye contact. Imagine walking into a room and someone avoids looking at you. As a religious and ethnic minority, I never know what the hangup is. It happens all the time. It’s the norm.”

The Team U.S.A.

The 2015 attacks in Paris and in San Bernardino, inspired by the Islamic State, heightened anti-Muslim feeling. Hate crimes, big and small, tripled within a month of San Bernardino. A Muslim taxi-driver was shot in Pittsburgh. Mosques were set on fire. A Muslim woman attending a town meeting in West Bloomfield, Michigan, was jeered as "a terrorist, a rapist, a murderer, and booed,” she said, “and the worst part is that about ninety per cent of the people cheered.” The Islamic Center in Omaha was vandalized for the fourth time. In the Bronx, three boys punched a sixth-grade girl and pulled off her hijab. In Queens, a Muslim shop owner was beaten by a man ranting anti-Islam slurs. In South Salt Lake, Utah, a swastika was spray-painted on a pastry shop owned by a Muslim. In February, the Pew Research Center reported that one in four Americans surveyed believe that at least half the Muslims in the United States—there are now some 3.3 million—are anti-American. One in ten polled think all Muslims living in the United States are anti-American.

“I can’t walk around late by myself anymore or go see friends at night,” Muhammad told me. As an African-American, she worries about asking authorities for help. “We’re living through a really crazy moment, a time when a lot of minorities are afraid to call the police,” she said. Last month, she was with a group harassed by men in a pizza parlor, as police officers stood nearby. “I was surprised that they weren’t saying anything to these men—even just ‘Leave them alone.’ I thought about saying, ‘Excuse me, officer,’ then I was afraid it might escalate. So I didn’t say anything.”

Tensions increased after Donald Trump called for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.” Two days after his speech, Muhammad wrote on her Facebook page, “Never let another person's misconceptions about your race, gender or religion hinder you from reaching your goals.” She also tweeted, “Friends don’t let friends like Trump.” In an online interview with AOL Build, she said, “I owe to it other minorities and to the Muslim community to use my position and speak out against bigotry and hate.”

In 1957, President Dwight Eisenhower dedicated the Islamic Center in Washington, D.C., and vowed that Muslims were welcome “under the American Constitution and in American hearts . . . just as welcome as any other religion.” Six days after the September 11, 2001, attacks, President George W. Bush visited the center and declared, “Women who cover their heads in this country must feel comfortable going outside their homes. Moms who wear cover must be not intimidated in America. That's not the America I know.” Until recently, President Barack Obama had shied away from grand gestures toward the American Muslim community. (A CNN/Opinion Research poll last September found that forty-three per cent of Republicans, twenty-nine per cent of independents, and fifteen per cent of Democrats actually believe that Obama, despite his professed Christianity, is Muslim.) But in February the President spoke at the Islamic Society of Baltimore, and invited ten prominent Muslims to meet with him for an hour and a half before the speech. The group included a heart surgeon, a senior at Yale, a California attorney, leaders of nonprofit organizations, two imams, and Ibtihaj Muhammad. Muhammad said that they all spoke candidly about the prejudices they face. The President listened closely.