REFINE Profile: Nora Alamiri and the Collective Experiences of Minority Students

By Rebekah Harding

Nora Alamiri is a boss by nature. As a senior public health major, she spends time working on the diversity and inclusion board at the College of Public Health to foster advocacy between students and staff. On Instagram, Alamiri posts chic, modest looks (with a sprinkle of edgy-ness) paired with her very own line of hijabs. While short in stature, her presence towers.

It took years of healing and self-discovery for her to blossom into the woman you see today, championing diversity and inclusion. In high school, she attended a predominantly white, homogeneous school where if something wasn’t eurocentric, it was othered and dismissed. As an Iraqi American Muslim teenager, embracing mainstream fashion and pop culture wasn’t enough to blend in.

Photo Credit: Nora Alamiri

“It was a constant struggle to not be like everybody else,” Alamiri said. “That turned into resentment towards everything that made me different. I didn't like my culture. I didn't like my religion. I didn't like anything about me that was different.”

Alamiri discovered that her feelings were shared by minority students of all backgrounds, leading her to examine the root of the problem because she was determined to make a change.

“Society preaches that you should be like everybody else. They want this subliminal, homogeneous population because it's easier to control people when everybody is acting like everybody else,” Alamiri explained. “And so, I want to create the new normal.”

She started the Minority Voices Project as an Instagram page in May to uplift the stories of racial, religious, and gender/sexuality minority students at universities across the country. Their backgrounds are all so different, but their experiences are undeniably similar.

Featured on the page, 2019 Temple alumnus Kashif Malik recounts his experience as a Muslim American in the public school system.

“Throughout my years of growing up, it felt as if I was living a double life,” Malik wrote in his post on the Minority Voices Project. “I would go to public school Monday [to] Friday, being surrounded by peers who had contrasting cultures than I had, and then on the weekends hang out with my desi Muslim friends who I felt the most comfortable around.”

In a neighboring post, Taylar Enlow, a junior global studies student with a concentration in the African diaspora, recounts a similar experience growing up as a Black woman.

“While growing up, there wasn’t a moment in which I didn’t feel out of place. I spent years basing my self-worth on my proximity to whiteness,” Enlow’s post details. “High school, in particular, was a difficult time because the majority of my most formative years were spent with me aspiring to whiteness. I didn’t know any better.”

The problem is clear. And Alamiri believes that the only way to remedy this is to put minority representation back in the hands of minorities, without filtering their voices through the white lens of commercialization.

“We are at a point in society where minorities are being used more, whether it be for promotion or display. It needs to be genuine. And I think the more genuine it is, the more it speaks to the larger population,” Alamiri said. “If you're a minority, you should represent yourself. You shouldn't have somebody else represent you in order for you to be validated.”

Although she’s finishing up her degree and is set to graduate this spring, Alamiri has begun pursuing MVP’s status as an official organization at Temple University, taking a break from posting on Instagram to focus on person-to-person campus outreach. She hopes that once the Minority Voices Project picks up on Temple’s campus, she can facilitate chapters at other universities. There’s even talk of pursuing non-profit status in the future.

Even as she prepares to leave campus and to hand down the campus organization to the students, one thing is for certain. Nora Alamiri is nowhere near finished.