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Speaking Out in Schools

By Sasha Khokha

Fatima Shah, 17, missed school last week because her father was afraid kids would spit on her. She had reason to worry. The Berkeley High School senior wears a Salwar-Kameeze, a traditional South Asian dress, and after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, other students gave her dirty looks. Some told her she didn’t belong.

But she does, and on Sept. 26, she took the stage in front of several hundred classmates and told them so.

“We want other kids to know that we are as American as they are,” she told an assembly of Berkeley High School students gathered for a campus anti-hate event. “It doesn’t matter if we dress differently. They said, ‘Go back to your country, your country is responsible.’ But they don’t even know where Pakistan is.”

Shah and a group of some 20 South Asian teens at Berkeley High spearheaded a student-led effort to combat the scapegoating they’ve experienced since the terrorist attacks.

South Asian students said they had faced taunting from their peers, and in some instances, had been followed home from campus. Several reported that a teacher had failed to intervene when his class repeatedly blamed a Muslim student for the attacks on the World Trade Center.

Last week’s events were organized by Cultural Unity, a South Asian student group mainly comprised of youth from low-income families, many of them recent immigrants.

They teamed up with Youth Together, a multiracial project designed to foster student leadership at five Bay Area high schools. The collaborative effort resulted in the anti-hate assembly, as well as two days of student teach-ins to address racial and religious prejudice.

Multiracial teams of students visited English classes and conducted hour-long workshops to engage their peers in a dialogue about terrorism and answer questions about Sikhism and Islam.

Manjinder Kaur, an 11th grader, said her mother asked her to take off her traditional head covering after the attacks. Her family was nervous, she said, because her father’s friend, also a Sikh, was shot at an Arizona gas station in a racially-motivated attack following the Trade Center tragedy.

Hira Quereshi visited several classes to tell her story. “We got a call from a stranger. They asked my 11-year-old brother who bombed the World Trade Center,” said Quereshi, 17, who immigrated from Pakistan four years ago.

Her frightened parents sent her brother to stay with friends for a week.

“We are scared, too. We feel we are part of America,” Quereshi said, crying, as the normally boisterous class watched her in awestruck silence.

“We didn’t do the bombing,” she said. “We are exactly like you. We wake up, we hear the news, we are worrying about our friends.” As she spoke, African American members of Youth Together touched her shoulder supportively.

The student teams then led their classmates through an exercise to help them understand scapegoating. They taped a “terrorist” sign to the back of a volunteer, and asked others to shout out different stereotypes.

“Foreigner, box-cutter, rag-head, Aladdin, Muslim!” students yelled, as the ugliness of those words opened their eyes to the discrimination faced by the Cultural Unity group.

“If I was that person, I’d feel real bad, I’d go home and start to cry,” said Bianca Watkins, 15, who volunteered to be the target in the scapegoating exercise. She admitted that she has made stereotypical comments about Arab Americans and South Asians in the past. “But I take it all back now,” she said.

Youth Together’s multiracial composition strengthened the outreach effort, said Josh Parr, staff coordinator of the group. When African American and white students co-presented workshops with South Asian youth, students were quick to draw parallels between anti-Muslim discrimination and measures like Proposition 21, an anti-crime measure focused on youth.

Some African American students compared stereotypes based on Muslim clothes to the targeting of youth for wearing gang colors.

“My teacher accused me of being in a gang when I wore a scarf on my head,” said an African American girl after hearing Quereshi speak.

Students plan to start a safety committee to escort South Asian and Middle Eastern students to school, or to come to classrooms if harassment is reported.

“We are working under the concept ‘I am, therefore you are,’ ” said Meliyah Coye, an 11th grader. “This isn’t the problem of one group, but the entirety of the school.”

Youth Together made that case to Superintendent Michelle Lawrence and Principal Frank Lynch. The two school officials initially barred the students from holding a campus-wide event, citing concerns that it might turn into an anti-war rally. Lynch said he would have an obligation to ensure equal airtime to “pro-war groups,” and expressed concerns about safety if speakers from off-campus were invited.

Student organizers convinced administrators that the event’s anti-hate focus made it relevant to everyone. Lawrence granted them permission to hold the assembly just two days prior to the intended date. Students scrambled to choreograph a Pakistani dance piece and fry up pakoras and somosas for a lunchtime bake sale to benefit Afghani refugees.

At a press conference prior to the cultural assembly, Berkeley City Council member Kriss Worthington presented a resolution declaring Berkeley a “Hate-Free Zone,” a measure the full council approved unanimously on Sept. 25.

Worthington said the resolution “is just the beginning,” and that he hoped to organize a response to individual incidents of bias, including students subjected to verbal harassment or pressure to stop wearing traditional clothing.