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Sixteen years ago, I left my marital home with two children and a bag full of whatever I could grab in a hurry.
I thought the hardest part would be explaining to my kids why we couldn’t go back.
It wasn’t.
The hardest part was house hunting.
I still remember the tone. Polite. Apologetic. “Sorry ya… owner prefer Chinese.” Or, “Owner takut Indian tenant cook strong smell.” Some didn’t even bother cushioning it. They just said, “The landlord doesn’t rent to Indians.”
Just like that. A whole identity reduced to a risk category.
At that time, I wasn’t a person. I was a stereotype. I was “Indian woman.” Possibly loud. Possibly problematic. Possibly unable to pay rent. The fact that I was a modern, educated woman with two well-behaving young children didn’t matter. The decision had already been made before I even viewed the house.
I wrote about it. I spoke about it. I rolled my eyes at landlords and employers who filtered human beings like they were sorting laundry.
And then last week, I became one of them.
I booked a cleaning agency I use once a month to help with heavy-duty chores at my parents’ house. Scrubbing grills. Cleaning windows. Climbing ladders to wipe the ceiling fans.
The admin texted, as usual: “Any request?”
Without thinking too hard, I typed: “Prefer male, below 35, and not Muslim.”
I hit send.
A few minutes later, it hit me.
Who exactly did I think I was?
I have written so many times about people who make specific requests - race, gender, religion - as if they are ordering custom-made furniture. I have argued that prejudice doesn’t always come wearing a white hood; sometimes it comes dressed as “preference.”
And here I was, packaging mine neatly with justification.
I told myself I had reasons.
I’ve tried female cleaners before. In my experience, they were slower and more chatty, and I needed efficiency because we were paying by the hour.
I’ve had male cleaners in their mid-40s who got visibly exhausted climbing ladders and cleaning the grills. I felt bad watching them huff and puff.
And since it’s Ramadan, I know how it feels to fast. I know the dryness in your throat at 3pm. I didn’t want to “burden” a fellow Muslim with physically demanding work on an empty stomach.
Look at me. So thoughtful.
So considerate.
So full of excuses.
Because if I’m honest, the only reason I wanted a younger, non-Muslim male cleaner was to get better value for my money.
The landlords who didn’t rent to me probably had their reasons too: “Indian tenants cook with too much oil.” “Single mother might not be stable.” “Better to go with what we’re used to.”
Every prejudice has a backstory that makes sense to the person holding it. That’s the uncomfortable truth.
Of course, my request is not the same scale as systemic housing discrimination. I am not denying someone shelter. I am not shutting a door on someone who needs it.
But that doesn’t mean it isn’t rooted in the same soil.
I reduced women cleaners to “slow and chatty.” I reduced older men to “physically incapable.” I reduced Muslim cleaners to “unable to perform well during Ramadan.”
Even if those observations came from experience, they are still conclusions drawn from a small sample and stretched across entire groups.
And that’s exactly what hurt me 16 years ago.
When I was house hunting, I wanted just one landlord to say, “Let me meet her first.” Not, “Let me filter her first.”
So where do we draw the line between practical preference and prejudice?
I don’t have a neat answer.
I know there are jobs that genuinely require physical strength. I know clients and businesses make matching decisions all the time. The world runs on profiling more than we care to admit.
But I also know how easy it is to slide from “This worked better before” into “People like this are better.”
And that’s a slippery slope.
The part that unsettled me most wasn’t the request itself. It was how quickly it came out of me. How natural it felt. How easily I justified it.
It reminded me that none of us are immune.
We criticise racism when we are hurt by it. We rationalise it when it benefits us.
Maybe the real work is not pretending we are morally superior, but catching ourselves in these small, uncomfortable moments.
The text I sent cannot be unsent.
But the awareness? That matters.
Because if I, someone who has felt the sting of being filtered out, can still fall into the same pattern, then perhaps the issue isn’t about “bad people.”
It’s about how deeply embedded these shortcuts are in all of us.
And maybe growth is simply this: the pause after we hit send.
Fa Abdul (fa.abdul.penang@gmail.com) is a content creator under the Newswav Creator programme, where you get to express yourself, be a citizen journalist, and at the same time monetize your content & reach millions of users on Newswav. Log in to creator.newswav.com and become a Newswav Creator now!
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