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SF Weekly - August 17, 2005
Suffer the Little Muslims
A look at the appalling discrimination against Middle Eastern
students countenanced by Bay Area public schools
By Cristi Hegranes
….. In the midst of the so-called War on Terror, U.S. schoolchildren of Middle Eastern descent and Muslim faith have suffered discrimination of a type and ferocity that would not be tolerated if it were aimed at other minority groups.
Some overtly racist behavior has become almost common in Bay Area schools; it is student-on-student and often involves racial slurs. But there have also been death threats. And in a surprising number of incidents, teachers have joined in, calling Middle Eastern students derogatory names, promoting stereotypes about their cultures, and ignoring violence against them. Although the Bay Area is generally considered hypersensitive to even small racial slights, school districts in the region appear to have done little about anti-Arab and anti-Muslim behavior, seldom punishing students or teachers even for grotesquely racist behavior aimed at children whose sole offense is to have Middle Eastern ancestry or Islamic beliefs.
In general, school districts here, across California, and throughout much of the country follow policies of resolving discrimination complaints "at the lowest possible level." This policy calls for bias complaints to be handled first by teachers and then by principals. Often, policy-makers -- superintendents and school board members -- hear of discrimination only when complaints are made in writing and addressed specifically to the central administration.
Because of cultural factors and fear of retaliation, many Middle Easterners are uncomfortable pressing such complaints, so official government statistics seldom reflect the students' experiences. It is, therefore, all but impossible to quantify the extent of recent discrimination against schoolchildren of Middle Eastern origin.
A study released in April by the Council on American-Islamic Relations shows that discrimination and hate crimes aimed at Arabs and Muslims in America increased by 49 percent last year over the previous year. CAIR began compiling statistics on discrimination against Muslims in America -- as reported to the group's local and regional offices -- in 1996. In 1998, 284 cases of discrimination were reported in CAIR's annual survey. In 2004, 1,522 cases were reported, with 20 percent of that total occurring in California.
The Office of Civil Rights in the U.S. Department of Education does keep statistics about complaints of racial or religious discrimination, but for a complaint to reach that level, a family has to pursue it through as many as six local and state channels first. The process can take years.
In the last four years there have been approximately 400 cases of racial or religious discrimination in schools reported to the Office of Civil Rights; 50 of them originated in California. Just one of those cases came from the Bay Area.
Clearly, however, such mistreatment is far more widespread in the Bay Area. During a month of research for this story, 27 Middle Eastern and/or Muslim families shared stories of discrimination at school with SF Weekly. Some spoke only with a promise of anonymity. Some enthusiastically came forward, but then retreated under pressure from family or community members. ("His father is too ashamed that this happened to him," says Arna, the mother of a 14-year-old Iranian boy in the San Francisco Unified School District.) A few spoke plainly about the discrimination they had faced.
In all the cases, the abuse was anything but subtle. It was open, raw, degrading -- and essentially ignored by the school districts in which it had been practiced……
Many of the families interviewed for this article claimed that the discrimination they complained of would have been handled differently by the schools "if it had happened to a black child or a Jewish child." While in theory complaints about school racism are handled without regard to the ethnicity of the victim, in practice there seems to be a difference. Anti-discrimination advocates and cultural experts agree: Black, Jewish, and other minority communities respond differently to discrimination than Arab and Muslim families do, and so get a different and more positive response from the authorities.
"Over the long years, we have learned to give ourselves an unquietable voice," says Mimi White, the mother of three African-American children, now adults, who faced discrimination in the San Francisco school district in the 1970s. White says that African-Americans have learned to join forces and loudly decry individual instances of discrimination.
But war abroad and the continued emphasis on terrorism at home have caused Middle Eastern communities to be fearful of coming forward. Many Muslim-American and immigrant families who spoke with SF Weekly say they were unwilling to come forward to address incidents of racism with school officials for fear of backlash against their children. Because of these fears, many Arab and immigrant families never pursue punitive or legal action against teachers or students who actively and openly discriminate.
"A lot of these families just go along because they don't want to draw attention to themselves and so they just turn the other cheek," says Banafsheh Akhlaghi, a lawyer and founder of the National Legal Sanctuary for Community Advancement, an organization that specializes in civil rights and discrimination cases affecting Middle Easterners. "They don't know what their rights are, and they don't really talk about things like this among themselves. There is a lot of shame around it."
And sometimes, coming forward doesn't seem to help.
….. It's unclear what set of policy steps would significantly reduce mistreatment of Arab and Muslim schoolchildren in America. At the least, a change in the method of handling discrimination complaints seems in order. As it now stands, because almost none of these complaints makes it into official statistics, there is little way of determining the overall scope of the problem.
Some experts say that education and training are the answer. Specifically, they say, there should be increased focus on Islam and the Middle East in social studies and history courses in middle and high schools. They also advocate diversity training on Arab and Muslim culture for teachers and administrators.
But does it really take diversity training for teachers to know that Arab and Muslim schoolchildren should be treated as students, rather than suspects?.....
http://www.sfweekly.com/Issues/2005-08-17/news/feature.html
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