We asked community members a simple question: what does it mean to you to be Kurdish American? The answers were more varied than we expected, and more honest.

Some said it means carrying something heavy — a history of displacement, a language that the world has largely ignored, a homeland that exists more in memory than on any map. One woman in her sixties said she thinks about her mother’s village every day, a place she left as a teenager and has never returned to. For her, being Kurdish American is inseparable from that particular grief.

Younger respondents talked about it differently. A college student in Texas said being Kurdish American is the best thing about him — he has access to two cultures, two languages, two ways of understanding the world, and most people only get one. A high school student in Nashville said she used to wish she was just American, but now she is glad she is not just anything. These are not contradictory perspectives. They are different points on a journey that the Kurdish American community, as a whole, is still making.