once wild

anonymousgoober:

oncewild:

(by AnNamir™)

My school has a dress code, so the students are required to wear khaki, dark blue, and white every day.  However, we have a very large Somali population (both Bantu and Arabic), most of them Muslim, and one of the most beautiful sights is the colorful hijabs among the sea of students.  Two of my girls wear some of the most stunning hijabs, and it’s always a delight to see the turquoise and the designs and the flowers.

The relationship between the youngest Somali girls who wear hijabs and their hijabs is interesting because there’s still a little bit of freedom—at least within some of the families—for young girls not to wear one occasionally.  One of my students has not worn a hijab three or four times, and it’s actually quite interesting how her personality shifts on those days when she’s not wearing one.  She’s also gone through stages where she’s pulled out her bangs from the covering.  The other students in my class are always intrigued by her hair when she comes bareheaded, and another one of my students (her cousin) is very insistent that no one touch the girl’s hair when it’s uncovered.  For whatever reason, I’m fascinated by the process of my students ‘feeling out’ this part of their culture.

I think it’s very interesting, the classmate’s interest in their culture. I taught a class a couple of years ago, during university placement, and nobody showed any interest in the cultures of two muslim girls I taught. When one of the girls walked into the classroom one morning, the boys sitting at the back of the room made the sound effect of somebody yodelling crudely, followed by a bomb going off.

I don’t remember ever being so angry.

But there was no encouragement in that school for students to get involved with their culture, no interest in what they believe or why. Because of the taboo associated with ‘The Middle East’, and ‘Terrorism’.

 How old were your students?  Though we’ve dealt with some racism among my first graders, it’s a much greater issue in the upper grades (and it is definitely a serious issue).  The student population at my school is predominantly Hispanic, African-American, and Somali, and students—even the little ones—occasionally reveal the racial baggage that they carry from home in their interactions at school.

Two moments that really stick out to me as moments when I realized—Wow, it’s so obvious that kids are socialized and taught racism and bigotry at a very young age—ocurred less than two weeks apart.  The first happened between an African-American student and a Hispanic student.  The former, unhappy with something the latter had done, said, “Nobody likes you.  You should go back to Mexico.”  When I talked to them, the child who’d made the comment didn’t seem to understand why the comment was even wrong.  Though I talked with his parents, it was one of those cases where one suspects that not a lot would be done as the child had likely heard those same sorts of comments/messages at home.

The second occurred when the above mentioned Somali girls talked about Ramadan and how it was a celebration they looked forward to.  Some students were curious about the celebration, but others made fun of the girls—mocking both their religion and their language (Arabic, though they also speak Somali).  The literacy lesson was over at that point and many a phone call was made home.  The father of one of the boys who had done the teasing came down to the school and made his son apologize to the girls and shake their hands that same morning.  I was impressed by the contriteness of the son and that the father recognized the seriousness of his son’s actions, particularly since the families of students at my school tend not to get involved with the goings on at school at all.