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SUFFER THE LITTLE MUSLIMS About Islam | Suffer the Little Muslims Suffer the Little Muslims A look at the appalling discrimination against Middle Eastern students countenanced by Bay Area public schools By Cristi Hegranes Published: Wednesday, August 17, 2005 San Francisco Weekly Laila and her friend Cathleen were hanging out in the courtyard at Galileo Academy of Science & Technology, talking about shopping to blow off steam after their sixth-period math test. It was a cool December day in San Francisco, and Laila remembers wanting to go inside early. A few minutes before the bell rang to end the lunch period, Laila, a Muslim student who wears a hijab, the head scarf worn by many Muslim women, says she noticed a boy, whom she recognized but did not know, approaching them. "He walked right over to us," Laila says. "There were a lot of people standing around. He got real close, and then he just started screaming at me: '"Her father is bin Laden! She's going to blow up the school, she's going to blow it up! She has a bomb under her sweater! Everybody run, this jihad girl is going to kill us!'" Laila says the boy and his two friends doubled over, laughing. Other students walked quickly as they passed. "I was so mad, just so embarrassed. I wanted to spit in his face," Laila says. Laila, who is 17 and recently graduated, says she faced this kind of harassment and discrimination at school many times over the last four years. But the bin Laden incident stuck with her because so many people witnessed it, both students and teachers, and no one did or said anything about it. "I had math after lunch, and I told my teacher what happened," Laila says. "My teacher said she had heard the whole thing. And then she said I shouldn't make a big deal out of it. 'He has the right to express his opinions,'" Laila remembers her saying. Laila told her teacher that she didn't think that was fair. "She told me that my people had caused a lot of problems in the world, and that I should understand if people were frustrated with me," Laila says. Laila went home and told her mother and father what had happened. When her mother, Sadaf, went to see the teacher, Sadaf says, she was sent away. "She asked me to come back after the Christmas break," Sadaf says. "And then she said, 'Or whatever you people celebrate.'" Sadaf never went back. She never filed a complaint either. Racism has long been a consequence of war. As governments seek to mobilize their citizens, the "enemy" is dehumanized into Huns or Japs or Charlie. In today's War on Terror, however, more than a third of the world fits into the United States government's profile of a potential terrorist. People from North Africa, India, the Middle East, and South Asia have become suspects. "When you fight a war with a country, you know who your enemies are. This is a war about an idea, an idea that people here have no idea about," says Ali Hasani, an Iraqi immigrant who lives in Oakland. "We are assumed guilty because we look like what people are afraid of." There is room for legitimate debate about the proper responses to the potential for domestic terrorism, but one clearly indefensible reaction has been widely seen and little discussed. 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. San Francisco school district spokesman Roqua Montez says he could find no information about what happened to Laila at Galileo Academy. But, Montez insists, incidents of racial and religious discrimination are rare on the "tolerant and inclusive" campuses of San Francisco. Many Arabs and Muslims have a less rosy view. "It's hard to know what to do when you tell a teacher something bad happened, and then she does the exact same thing," Laila says. "I feel stupid having to tell people that my father isn't bin Laden. But sometimes it feels like I have to." Inas Elmashni of the Arab Cultural Center in San Francisco works with Arab students in four high schools around the city. She was not surprised to hear about what happened to Laila. "Most of the time, when students come forward, nothing is ever done," she says. "For every teacher who is really dedicated, there are a lot who are ignorant. A lot of times our students aren't treated fairly, and they aren't taken seriously." Other cases of discrimination from the San Francisco schools include that of a ninth-grade Muslim boy who found 10 notes in his locker on the one-year anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks on New York and Washington, D.C. The notes all said, "Killer." The family says the boy brought the notes home, but they never made an issue of it with the school. A 10th-grade Muslim girl who wanted to try out for the drill team at Washington High was told the day before tryouts that she couldn't be on the team. "They told me not to even try out because they couldn't trust me because I was dangerous, and they said I was too ugly with 'that rag on my head,'" the 16-year-old girl, who asked not to be named because she still attends the school, says. In other local school districts with similar policies on discrimination complaints, the scenarios are unfortunately familiar. When the Elgharoui family decided that their daughter, Shana, should leave the Fremont public school system to attend a private Islamic school, they had a very specific reason. In March 2004, a substitute teacher told Shana that she would not teach someone who outwardly supported terrorism. When Shana became upset and insisted that neither she nor her family supported any such thing, Shana's mother, Samina, alleges, the substitute responded, "Well then what is that on your head?" Like hundreds of other Muslims in the Fremont Unified School District, Shana wears a hijab to school. Wearing a hijab in no way connotes support for terrorism. "Not all Muslim women wear it, so a lot of people think that when you do it's because you are a radical or something," Samina says. But that isn't the case. The teachings of the Quran ask that women wear the hijab so they can be recognized as Muslim, and as a sign of modesty, Samina says. Samina says she reported the incident to Shana's teacher. "But then we never heard anything else," she says. An immigrant from Somalia, Samina admits that she didn't know what her family's rights were, and, besides, Shana's father wanted to keep the incident quiet. "He said, 'The last thing we need is any trouble and people looking at us,'" she recalls. But in light of a 2004 case in Oklahoma, in which the U.S. Department of Justice supported a student's right to wear a hijab at school, Samina says she expected some response from the school district. Dr. John Rieckewald, the superintendent of the Fremont school district, says he is unaware of the incident. But, he says, complaints against substitute teachers are handled in personnel, so he likely wouldn't have heard about it. Cheryl Bushmire, the director of personnel for the Fremont district, isn't aware of Shana's case either. "Sometimes things happen that are resolved at the site," she says. Indeed, they are; Bushmire confirms that the Fremont school district also has a policy that aims to resolve complaints "at the lowest level, if possible." "A lot of school administrators went to the school of 'let sleeping dogs lie,'" says Charles Haynes, a senior scholar at the First Amendment Center, an Arlington, Va.-based nonprofit educational organization. "They just want to ignore it and hope it goes away. But discrimination rises to a much more important level when teachers or principals do it, because they are supposed to be responsible. It poisons the climate of the school." To its credit, the Fremont district is one of the few in the Bay Area that has disciplined a teacher for discrimination against a Middle Eastern student. "We have had a few situations that were well documented and were dealt with right away," Superintendent Rieckewald says. "We had one situation where a teacher was transferred and another was suspended for several days for making inappropriate comments." One case involved an African-American student, the other a Middle Eastern student. Rieckewald says that he and the school board take the issue of discrimination seriously and have been proactive in attempting to increase education efforts in regard to Islam, in part because Fremont has a large Afghan and Muslim population. But at lower levels, teachers and principals may not be taking discrimination as seriously as the district might hope. Among the other incidents in the Fremont school district reported to SF Weekly was that of a third-grade Muslim girl who received a card at a classroom Valentine's Day party in 2002. The card read, "Why does your family always blow themselves up?" The card was given to the teacher by the girl's mother, but, the mother says, the school took no action. William, who graduated from Mission San Jose High School in Fremont in 2004, describes his family as Muslim "but practically secular." He says he was called a "sand nigger and a camel jockey hundreds of times over the last few years." William says he wrote a letter to Mission San Jose Principal Stuart Kew during the spring semester of his senior year describing the extent of the problems he had faced and offering some suggestions about how it might be stopped in the future. He never received a response. "I can't remember that letter," Kew says. "But normally I do respond." Kew says that he is aware that discrimination happens in his school. "It happens everywhere," he says. In several other Bay Area school systems, discrimination against Arab and Muslim students also seems to have been ignored, at least in some cases. In Hercules, an Iranian-American sophomore, Hassan Rahgozar, was beaten in a school bathroom in May. Apparently at the request of the students who planned the attack, the beating was videotaped and later posted on the Internet. The family pressed charges against the two attackers and is suing the West Contra Costa Unified School District for failing to protect Hassan. Bill Berg, the family's lawyer, says Hassan was also attacked earlier, in April, and repeatedly endured racial slurs. (The West Contra Costa school district refused to comment on the pending lawsuit.) And in Sacramento, a seventh-grade girl found a written death threat in her locker after she tried to start a Middle Eastern club in which Muslim students could pray together on Friday afternoons. Other states have policies that encourage informal complaint resolution, and many districts nationwide have also been hesitant to punish teachers who act inappropriately toward Muslim and Arab students. In some seemingly egregious cases, lawsuits have followed. In a suburb of New Orleans, a Muslim girl filed a lawsuit in January, alleging that her teacher, Wes Mix, used religious slurs against her and physically yanked off her religiously mandated head scarf last year. Jefferson Parish School District Superintendent Diana Roussel recommended the teacher's termination last July, but the school board overruled the decision in a closed-door hearing, suspending Mix for several weeks and requiring him to complete sensitivity training before returning to school in the fall instead. He was also required to apologize to the student. The lawsuit is pending. Similarly, in Nevada, 17-year-old Jana Elhifny and the American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit against the Washoe County School District last October. The suit alleges that nothing was done after Jana received a death threat and was routinely verbally assaulted by classmates based on her religion. Without reliable statistics, it is impossible to gauge the full extent of the problem of discrimination against Arab and Muslim students in the Bay Area. But it is clear that the policy of handling school discrimination "at the lowest possible level" could have serious legal consequences. In 1998, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco ruled that a school district could be held liable for a "hostile racial educational environment" under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits discrimination of any kind in programs that receive federal funds. "Under the current law, if there is harassment and school officials know about it, they could be held liable," says Haynes of the First Amendment Center. "They are setting themselves up for a lawsuit. What's worse, it can't be left to the people creating the problem to take it up the line. They aren't going to." 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. Elmira Dianati is an Iranian mother who says her son endured intense discrimination at La Entrada middle school in Menlo Park during the 2001-2002 school year. Dianati's son, who asked that his name not be used, says he became a target for his eighth-grade English teacher, Brian Kelly, just after Sept. 11, 2001. Throughout the year, Kelly made fun of the student's ethnic name, calling him "Trash Can," which rhymes with his Persian name. Dianati and several of her son's classmates say the name-calling went on all year. The discrimination culminated, they say, in an event near the end of the school year when, Dianati alleges, Kelly told his class that he was having a special breakfast party before the students took their exams. And then, while Dianati's son was in the library, some classmates say that Kelly told them "no Persians" were allowed at the breakfast. Dianati's yearlong, well-documented struggle with the school, the school district, the county, and the state to bring her son's situation to the attention of administrators serves as a primary example of why more Middle Eastern parents don't pursue complaints formally. When she first found out about the name-calling, Dianati says, she went to see her son's teacher. She says he was very friendly and told her that her son was a delight to have in class. When her son became increasingly withdrawn and depressed, she pursued the matter with La Entrada Principal Dee Brummet. "All I wanted was for Mr. Kelly to apologize to my son in front of the class," Dianati says. "That is all we asked for, but it never happened." In a meeting with Brummet, another school administrator, Dianati, and Dianati's husband, Kelly admitted that he had used the names "Trash Can" and "Ashtray," but he claimed he had the boy's permission to do so. Kelly denied having said Persians were not welcome at the class breakfast. Brummet agreed to investigate Dianati's claim further and interviewed 17 students. All of the students were interviewed with Kelly present; some hadn't even been in class during the incident. Even so, three students did say that Kelly had made the statement that no Persians were going to be allowed at the event. Perhaps what is strangest about Kelly's alleged comment is how Dianati's son and other classmates say it came up in class. A letter from the federal Office of Civil Rights says that when Kelly announced the breakfast party, he "participated in a conversation in which students were joking about whether students of different racial and ethnic backgrounds could attend." Several of the students in Kelly's class confirmed that some students raised their hands to ask if Asian and African-American kids could come to the breakfast party. Out of this conversation, Dianati and three of her son's classmates allege, Kelly made the "no Persians" remark. "The fact that this teacher created an environment where the kids had to think about what category they belonged to says a lot about the teacher," Dianati says. After the interviews, the principal told Dianati there was not enough evidence to determine that Kelly had ever said Persians were not welcome at the breakfast. Dianati continued to ask for a public apology. In letters made available to SF Weekly, Brummet promised Dianati an apology on May 29. When that didn't happen, Dianati was assured the apology would take place on June 3. "The day before graduation I met with the principal again, and she assured me that the apology in front of the class was planned for that day," Dianati says. But Kelly never apologized to her son. "This is a school. This is where kids are supposed to learn how to deal in a society. Teachers are not just responsible for math and science," Dianati says. "We are supposed to teach kids that when you make a mistake, you apologize." Dianati says that when she brought her concerns to the superintendent, MaryAnn Somerville, she received a fast response that included a request that Dianati not contact any local media about the issue. "I told them I didn't want to do that or to sue. I was not after money. All I wanted was for my son's request to be filled -- he wanted an apology." When the superintendent's office told Dianati that based on the principal's investigation there was no evidence to proceed, she took her complaint to the school board. The board told her that it would not investigate further or punish Kelly because witnesses had heard Dianati's son call Kelly names first. "'You've got to be kidding me,'" Dianati says she told them. "They said that my son had called Mr. Kelly 'Mrs. Kelly.' To me, that just showed their mentality. They didn't care that anything had happened, and they weren't interested to do the right thing." So she went to the next level, the San Mateo County Board of Supervisors, which ruled against her, contending she did not file a complaint within six months, as required by law. Then Dianati went to the state Department of Education, where, in addition to the "no Persians" comment, she complained about the teacher's name-calling and the school's refusal to apologize. The state asked Brummet for the list of the 17 students she had interviewed. When the principal said she had destroyed the list, the state dropped the case. So Dianati took her complaint to the national level and the Office of Civil Rights. On April 11, 2003, Dianati and her son received the response: There was insufficient evidence to prove that Kelly or the school district had violated federal discrimination law. But, Dianati says, she never wanted to make a federal case out of her son's problems. She just wanted him to receive an apology for the year of abuse he'd suffered. Now, four years later, Superintendent Somerville says she hardly remembers the incident. "As I recall, it was about a remark made about an ethnic group," Somerville says. She says she does remember that Dianati's son did not appear to harbor any bad feelings for the teacher, and that she feels the case was resolved properly. Kelly left the school in 2004 to teach in South America; attempts to reach him for comment were unsuccessful. 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? It does in Daly City. In 2003, Amir, a fifth-grader at Daly City's Skyline Elementary School, says he was nervous about presenting a family history report in class. He hates public speaking; he is small for his age and thinks his voice is squeaky. But there was another reason for his apprehension. Amir's family is from Iraq, and some of his family members have the last name Hussein. "He told me while we were pasting up some photographs [for the report] he was worried about what his classmates would say because of the war," his mother, Ariana, says. "I told him not to be silly." When it was Amir's turn to present his report, he got up before the class, leaned his poster board of photographs on the rim of the chalkboard, and gave his five-minute report. As he finished, he asked if there were any questions. After their reports, other students had been asked about family resemblances and holiday celebrations. "His teacher asked him when his family came to America. Then she asked him if his family in Iraq supported America in the war," Ariana says. Amir answered that his family had been in America for about 15 years, and he didn't know all of his family members in Iraq, so he didn't know how they felt about the war. "Then she said, 'So you don't know if they are terrorists?'" Ariana says. Amir just shook his head. Amir received a 75 on his report. On the scoring sheet used to tally points, he received zero out of 10 points for "ability to answer questions about family history." "When he told me what happened, I was furious. And he was so upset," Ariana says. She wrote a letter to Amir's teacher, but never spoke to her or the principal about it. "Now I wish I would have," she says. Tim Sullivan, the principal of Skyline Elementary School, says that had the problem come to his attention he would have investigated it "and made sure it didn't happen again." "It's not that I doubt what this family is saying," he says. "It's just that the problem never came to me." Amir is now in middle school in Daly City. Ariana says he has become more comfortable with both himself and his culture, especially after a family reunion in Detroit last year. But Ariana is still angry about her son's fifth-grade teacher. "I understand if you have your own opinions and your own politics," she says. "But I don't understand how you can be a teacher and take your stuff out on little children." |
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