My customers don’t know I’m Muslim
I’m a Muslim man who works for my family’s business in a predominantly Jewish area. Most of our customers are Jewish, and I genuinely have nothing against Jewish people or any other group. They have no idea I’m Muslim.
What’s been difficult for me is hearing the things some customers openly say about Muslims, Islam, and people from the Middle East when they assume nobody around them is Muslim. Some of the comments honestly shock me. I’ve never experienced this kind of casual prejudice so directly before. Outside of work it is easy to handle these situations because I’m not afraid of losing customers.
The strange part is that these same people are kind to me personally because they don’t know I’m Muslim. I’ve never told most customers because I honestly feel like some of them would stop coming back if they knew.
It creates this weird feeling where I spend all day serving and talking to people who might completely view me differently if they knew who I was.
I’m not posting this to attack anyone or start arguments. I’m just wondering if anyone else has experienced something similar — feeling accepted personally, while hearing people speak negatively about a group you belong to when they think nobody from that group is around.