I was an uncomfortably shy twelve-year-old, dealing with a stubborn new mustache, perpetually crooked glasses, and this growing feeling that — because of my religion and the way I looked in my brown skin, in my off-brand basketball shorts, with my wavy black hair, and my meek, cracking voice — I didn’t belong.

It was summer in Springfield, Illinois, and I was playing basketball with an older white boy who lived down the street, when he suddenly decided to say something about my mom.

The thing is though, on the court, with the ball in my hand, I always felt a little more confident, and a little more like a grown man — which, at that age, meant some combination of Michael Jordan, Tom Cruise, and the prophet Muhammad.

There were even times when I felt so dominant dribbling across the lane that I would forget how uncool my off-brand shoes were or that my clothes smelled like ilish maas or whatever Bangladeshi torkari my mom was cooking that day. I’d let my arm linger in the air after a shot, and sometimes smile knowingly as the ball sailed over the other guy’s outstretched hand. Swish.

In those brief moments, I was the hero: strong, on top of the world.

This kid from my block, though, he was better than me. Not only was he a year older, but he was bigger, had post moves, and was more adept at trash talk. You’re weak. You shoot like a girl. And though I was used to this, today my game was off — and his insults were piercing.

“Why does your mom wear that thing on her head?” he asked with a smirk I can still picture nearly twenty years later. “I heard it’s because she has warts all over her face.”

I paused about fifteen feet from the basket, feeling the synthetic leather of the ball in my sweaty hands, staring at his sideways mouth, thinking about my ammu and her hijab. Thinking about the game I was losing. About how much I hated being on the outside of everything.

It was a silly, incoherent insult in retrospect, but as the rush of all my 12-year-old anxieties converged, I suddenly felt exposed.

So I threw the ball directly at his face — knocking him to the ground. He looked up and laughed. But for an instant, standing above him like that, I felt something like strength. I gave him the finger (probably the wrong one) and got on my bike to ride away, only to realize halfway down the block that we were playing in my driveway. I kept going anyway — overcome with anger, tears, embarrassment.

That was the entire extent of my first “fight,” but over time, it became something larger in my mind. Though white supremacists burnt down our city’s mosque two years earlier, and I had found a neo-Nazi newsletter on our doorstep once after that, it wasn’t until I felt the sting of that boy’s words that I began to understand exactly how different I was in this country.

But I never got in another fight. In seventh grade, when bullies held me upside down on the playground, called me “Apu,” and stole my lunch money (really), I didn’t hit anyone. On the bus back from a basketball game freshman year, when they thought it was funny to pull their pants down and sit on my face as I slept, I just woke up and pretended to laugh with them (and took two showers when I got home).

There instead developed this overwhelming feeling of otherness, one that wouldn’t coalesce until a few years later, when, on September 11th, teachers asked me to stand at the front of their classes and “explain what was going on.” And a few days after that, when some peers whispered “Osama” as I walked down the hallway.

But in that period after Al-Qaeda’s attack, as paranoia spread in the U.S., I still kept my own frustrations mostly inside, just below the surface when I was pulled over for looking “strangely” at a white cop, or when passing strangers would call me a “sand n — r.”

Despite my increasing awareness of the world’s imbalance, I was never quite angry enough to hurt another person. And I was lucky enough that I was never in a situation where my life was in immediate physical danger or where I felt I had to fight back to survive.

Because the truth is, it wasn’t my religion or the experience of racism that led me to knock down a boy on that summer’s day.

It’s true I looked up to Muhammad as a kid and even dreamt of becoming him, even if I knew that was impossible. And it’s also true that part of his appeal was the fact that he defeated his enemies in battle.

But the idea that I could feel powerful through aggression, that inflicting pain on someone — fighting — would prove my manhood and keep me safe above others, wasn’t a lesson learned from any single source. It was ubiquitous in the world I grew up in.

It was at the movies, where “action heroes” like Cruise were “good” white men who solved their problems through violence. It was on the news, where I learned we desire dominance in our “commander in chief,” more often than thoughtfulness. It was in how men were glorified in my local Bangladeshi community, where at dinner parties, they ate first and led prayer, as women prepared the meals and stood in the back. And yes, it was in my understanding of religion, where I learned at Sunday school that all the prophets — all the greatest of human beings — were men.

But it was also reflected in what I was reading at public school, where history was framed as this long, bloody battle between men — which was, of course, always won by the strongest, richest, and whitest ones. I couldn’t win that game, but I wanted to play it anyway. I could never change my skin color — but I could still be a man within my own communities. On the basketball court. At the mosque. In my family. A little hit of power was always within reach.

I’m not a Muslim anymore — I stopped believing over a decade ago — but I’ve thought a lot about that childhood “fight,” and the frustration I felt afterwards recently. As an angry young man walked into a church in Charleston to kill nine Black people last year, and as another one was sentenced to death for setting off a bomb in Boston, I recognized parts of my own story in theirs.

Not because of Islam, or because I sympathize with their horrific choices, but because I also grew up as a boy in this country.

Contrary to how we often talk about these incidents, and as uncomfortable as it may be to admit, I don’t think terrorism is a product of some supernatural “evil” or the result of some unknowable illness. Surely many social issues work together to produce the environments in which dangerous thinking flourishes, but there is a too-often unspoken link between men resorting to violence and the same everyday hypermasculine culture that’s made shooting virtual human beings one of America’s favorite pastimes, alongside the harassment of women online, and the celebration of misogyny in sports.

It’s a culture which all of us, to varying degrees, participate in.