Today, every time a mass or school shooting or act of terrorism occurs in America, one thought races through the minds of many Muslim individuals: Please don’t be brown. In light of the events that took place on September 11, 2001, Muslim families and people across the globe become a scapegoat for the tragedy that ensued on that date. Every time a person of color commits an atrocity their actions are immediately linked with the Taliban or Islamic extremist. The idea of Muslim people has become essentialized as a group of people who want to “destroy the Christian nation.” In 2014, studies show that bigotry against Muslims, especially women, is at an all time high and despite Muslim people being approximately 2 percent of the nation, over 20 percent of reports filed in the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) are from Muslim people, fighting against job discrimination. While this of course has a huge impact on older generations and adults who lived through the 9/11 attack, it overwhelmingly has the ability to hurt children who either the 9/11 attack had nothing to do with them, or they were not even born in 2001. Family and social structure is important in developing children, and if they grow up with preconceived, dehumanizing notions that people will be racist against them, they have less of a chance to make it through schooling successfully, and will grow up with a victim mentality.
Children easily pick up mannerisms and language from parents, and if parents do not discuss the harm language can do to other people, children will grow up thinking their problematic behaviour is okay. Through this, they can connect with other children whose parents have the same views, or learned from each other, and can begin to develop simple social class systems. In “Social Structures and Daily Life,” C. Wright Mills explains that a child’s social standing is what “predicts their school’s success and ultimate life chances.” While the article directly mentions the relationship between the parent’s wealth and where the children go to school, this can also be applied to other types of social structures, even more simplistic ones that children create. Children who are raised to believe that brown skinned people, or girls who wear the hijab, or other ethnic markers are “bad people” or terrorists, those kids will grow up isolated, which could resulted in a stunted social development. Just as a parent’s social class will influence the “pace and rhythm of daily lives of family,” social structures brought on by bigoted ideas, developed from parents, will also influence a child’s school life. The media also shapes a child’s idea of social structures, especially when reports are run constantly, showing the abuse of Muslim families.
In August of 2013, two sisters were playing in a park when police officers approached them and told them to leave because the park closed. As they walked home, the police followed them and asked for their IDs as both girls, 12 and 14, were put in choke holds. Their hijabs were ripped off, and the police accused them of disorderly actions, for playing handball in a park after it was closed. While this is an extreme account, since 9/11 the NYPD has taken extreme measures in the surveillance and profiling of Muslims in religious communities. When the girls’ 15 year old brother came out to ask why his sisters were in handcuffs with their hijabs torn off, the police proceeded to arrest him and charged him for interfering with arrest. The Huffington Post writer Yazmine Hafiz writes that in 2013, stop and frisk actions went up 80 percent within religious communities, and no man, woman or child is safe. Dean Obeidallah, a writer for The Daily Beast writes, “just last week my friend Linda Sarsour, a hijab-wearing civil rights activist, was attacked on the streets of New York City by a man who shouted that he wanted to behead her and then chased her into traffic.” It is here where the assault against Muslim individuals civil rights (and bodies) starts to become normalized, and the toxicity of the situation can permeate within children’s culture. After all, if a police officer finds Muslim people bad just by looking at them, why should a child think otherwise?
Obeidallah writes in his news article, “13 Years After 9/11, Anti-Muslim Bigotry is Worse Than Ever,” that in October 2001, an ABC Poll found that over 47 percent of Americans had favourable views of Islam—in 2014, they put out the same poll and found that the number had dropped to 27 percent. As previously mentioned, Muslims only make up 2 percent of the US, and a recent Pew Poll found that more than “60 percent of Americans don’t even personally know a Muslim.” These numbers tell how such a small portion of the US is hated as an overall group, even if someone never met a Muslim. Conservative leaders tell the people that they should “be wary of Muslim Americans because they are planning to kill Christians.” It is hate-speech like this that creates panic in parents, and the panic trickles down to children. News stories constantly report Muslims in a negative light, heavily emphasizing ISIS’s beheadings and highlighting every time someone connected to Islam commits an atrocity—even if the atrocity had nothing to do with radical Islamic extremism. The hijab, to non-Muslim Americans, represents Islam, and by representing Islam they are akin to terrorists, which show in the EEOC’s 2014 findings about discrimination in the work force.
As previously mentioned, 20 percent of all 2013 EEOC discrimination in the workplace comes from Muslim women. In 2001, approximately 10% of a much smaller population of Muslim individuals reported religious discrimination in the work place (and these numbers include men and women). If the rise in police brutality and bullying of school children did not prove anything, then this quantitative data shows clearly the 10% rise in discrimination, especially toward women, because they are easier targets because they openly wear their religion. The numbers speak for themselves, and the ACLU also has data compiled about the rising need of Muslim’s needing legal protection.
According to the American Civil Liberties Union website specifically aimed toward protecting the rights of Muslim people, they write,
Most recently, Muslim communities in the U.S. have faced a disturbing wave of bigotry and outright hostility. From religiously motivated discrimination and attacks on existing and proposed Islamic centers to misguided congressional hearings, Muslims in America are being unfairly targeted simply for exercising their basic constitutional right to religious liberty (ACLU).
The ACLU took the time to make sure Muslims new their rights, and there was someone there to help them, in the event discrimination occurred. Such a category did not exist until Post 9/11, and when the fuel of hatred from radical conservative groups sparked panic in the general population. Some of the issues they specifically list on their website include, “discrimination based on looks, especially against Muslim women, bans on Sharia and International law, attacks on Islamic cultural centers, invasive questioning at U.S. borders and airports, and FBI mapping of local communities an businesses based on race and ethnicities.” All of the mentioned issues are currently pending or past cases the ACLU has tackled, and continued to tackle. In addition, over 180 Muslims have died at the hands of police or citizen brutality, simply for being Muslim.
The real question is how can America fix this racialized problem, and help fix children’s racist interpretations of their social structures? Lessons can be both taken and avoided from multicultural feminism. According to Maxine Bacca Zinn and Bonnie Thornton Dill, multicultural feminism evolved from the discourse that denied differences between white and women of color culture. The problem with this is multicultural feminism becomes an “elective” of feminism, and its open subgenre. By keeping multicultural feminism in its own bubble, white, problematic feminists never had to face the ideas and separate oppression that women of color undergo. Thus, keeping the divide. If children were forced to reconcile that Muslim history was just as valid and worth learning about as Christian or Catholic history, a normalization of the idea that Muslims are people too would spread. Instead of making white (or in this case, Christianity) the default “feminism,” white feminists should be forced to learn and accept that intersectionality is realm and that they live in a culture where women of different ethnicities and races have different experiences. By dismantling the idea of Christianity and Western/European as the norm, perhaps children and the population at large will see the validity of other cultures/races/identities, and their ways of life will become less foreign. It starts with education the children, and deconstructing their ideas passed on by their parents that Muslims are an evil terrorist bunch that they should not play with.
