After looking at Omer Aziz’s impressive career achievements, it is surprising to learn the lawyer, journalist, and fellow at the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University struggles with feelings of being an outsider.
Growing up as a first-generation Pakistani Muslim in a working-class Scarborough neighbourhood is not the typical upbringing of most people in the powerful circles and world-class institutions Aziz joined.
Since graduating from Queen’s, the Artsci’12 alumnus went on to earn a Master of Philosophy (International Relations) at the University of Cambridge in England and then graduated from Yale Law School. He’s served as a foreign policy adviser in the Trudeau government and has written articles for major media companies such as The Globe and Mail, The New York Times, and The Atlantic.
Yet his religion, race, and socio-economic background made him feel like “a brown-skinned boy in an elite white world.”
He wrote about his journey in a new memoir, Brown Boy, detailing how Aziz wrestles with being caught between two worlds and how people’s biases make him feel like he is part of a world that never quite accepts him.
“I felt compelled to tell a story that many Americans and Canadians haven’t heard before because they have only seen Muslims and Brown people as terrorists and criminals or as people to help, as in ‘poor them, we have to help them,’” says Aziz.
Queen’s plays a major role in the book. When he first arrived on campus, one of his initial observations was that it was very white. It was his first time living outside his Scarborough neighbourhood.
He struggled to fit in due to people making assumptions about his Muslim background. Despite the challenging moments, he now feels Queen’s was an amazing intellectual training ground. His professors had high standards, which he is grateful for.
“I would say that despite going to Cambridge University and Yale Law School afterward, that there was no institution that changed me and pushed me as much as Queen’s, to the point where some of those other institutions were easier to deal with because of the training I had received at Queen’s,” Aziz says.
The intellectual training ground wasn’t just in the classroom. Aziz has fond memories of his deep, dorm-room conversations with Gordon Brockington House roommate, Darragh McNicholas, Artsci’11, which started with simple questions such as, “Does God exist?”
“We would clash, and other people would be interested, and they would join,” Aziz recalls. “So, it would be this massive social thing. On a Friday and Saturday night, our room might be full of people discussing and debating different ideas.”
Aziz fell in love with expanding his knowledge and world views. He spent hours reading in Stauffer Library and realized that education could open doors to a bigger world.
He hopes that Brown Boy readers from privileged backgrounds learn how people who are minorities and outsiders see the world and are treated differently. For BIPOC readers, he hopes his journey inspires them to seek knowledge and use education as a tool for change.
“(I’d like BIPOC readers to) develop the intellectual and verbal tools to understand what the system is, and how it has impacted you and your ancestors,” says Aziz. “The system wasn’t made for us. I didn’t let the system break my spirit. Maybe those who read this book will see themselves in it and come away with their world expanded slightly more.”
