How should schools respond to anti-Muslim actions against students?
Students took part in a Texas Muslim Capitol Day rally at the Texas Capitol in Austin earlier this year. (AP Photo/Eric Gay)
The call by Donald Trump, the presumed frontrunner in the race for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, to ban Muslim immigrants for an unspecified period of time, and recent terrorist attacks by Muslims in Paris and California have put Muslim Americans in an uncomfortable spotlight. Muslims report that hate speech and violence against them are on the rise, though many instances are not formally reported or prosecuted.
The FBI recently released new hate crime statistics from 2014, and an analysis of the latest available data for victims of reported single-bias hate crime incidents showed that:
• 48.3 percent of the victims were targeted because of the offenders’ bias against race.
• 18.7 percent were targeted because of bias against sexual orientation.
• 17.1 percent were victimized because of bias against religion.
• 12.3 percent were victimized because of bias against ethnicity.
• 1.6 percent were victims of gender-identity bias.
• 1.4 percent were targeted because of bias against disability.
• 0.6 percent (40 individuals) were victims of gender bias.
• 48.3 percent of the victims were targeted because of the offenders’ bias against race.
• 18.7 percent were targeted because of bias against sexual orientation.
• 17.1 percent were victimized because of bias against religion.
• 12.3 percent were victimized because of bias against ethnicity.
• 1.6 percent were victims of gender-identity bias.
• 1.4 percent were targeted because of bias against disability.
• 0.6 percent (40 individuals) were victims of gender bias.
Among the 1,140 people reported to have been victimized because of their religion, 56.8 percent were victims of crimes motivated by their offenders’ anti-Jewish bias and 16.1 percent were victims of anti-Islamic (Muslim) bias. But again, those figures speak to reported incidents, and many are never reported.
Such behavior does not stop at the school door, with a number of groups of students now targets of aggression, including blacks, LGBT students and some immigrant groups. This post deals with aggression toward Muslim students and what schools can do help relieve it.
It was written by Thea Renda Abu El-Haj and Sigal Ben-Porath. Abu El-Haj teaches at the Graduate School of Education at Rutgers University. A Palestinian American, she grew up Iran and Lebanon, and her family is from Jerusalem. She recently published the book “Unsettled Belonging: Educating Palestinian American youth after 9/11.” Ben-Porath teaches at the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania. She is Israeli and grew up in Paris and Jerusalem. In 2006, she published “Citizenship under Fire: Democratic Education in Times of Conflict.”
By Thea Renda Abu El-Haj and Sigal Ben-Porath
A sixth-grade Somali Muslim girl was attacked in her New York City public school. Several boys beat her and tried to pull off her headscarf while calling How should schools respond to anti-Muslim actions against students? - The Washington Post:
