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By Andrew K. Mandel
Raymondville, Texas (population 8,880), is a long way from Manhattan. Not just geographically, although it does take nine hours just to drive out of the state. In New York, there are skyscrapers, traffic jams, and people from all over the world. And, as we learned one frightening fall day, terror.
Being so far away from New York, it was unclear how my students and I should respond to the images of smoke, debris and bodies on television after September 11. Some got angry and ludicrously flippant ("we’ve got to get those Siberians!").
Certain blasé others questioned how something in New York affected them at all ("why are they canceling my TV shows for something that happened over there?"). My response was information damage control, and I postponed my original lesson plans for a trip to the library to conduct some research and separate facts from opinions.
Apparently, children were not the only ones who needed some clarity. As my stunned students discovered in the subsequent weeks, revenge-seeking individuals killed, beat, harassed and defaced the property of innocent Muslim Americans, Arab Americans, Sikhs and members of many other senselessly targeted racial and religious groups.
To be sure, it took some members of my class a while to understand why this was a problem. "They deserved it – look what they did to us," one child said earnestly. I found this striking because the vast majority of my students identify as Mexican American, and I imagined that members of a minority group would automatically see the injustice in stereotyping.
Everyone, it turns out, needs to be reminded of treating individuals as individuals, and after lessons on Japanese internment, racial profiling on the highway and a variation on Jane Elliott’s famous "blue eyes, brown eyes" experiment, my students were starting to get the idea: "You can’t assume things about me just because of my last name!" Melissa crowed during a particularly heated session.
It occurred to many students that their ideas about Muslims came from the media – and that they had never met a member of the faith before. Someone suggested a trip. That perked some ears up!
We realized that the best way to tackle discrimination and prejudice was to meet Muslim Americans ourselves and tell others about our experience in the form of a book. The PEACE ("Providing Education About Culture through Experience") project was born.
I submitted an application for the Texas Education Agency’s Learn and Serve grant; while we waited for approval, we made children’s books about Christianity and Islam for our local elementary schools to both gain familiarity with our subject matter and do a small-scale model of our eventual project.
When the money came through, we were able to charter buses, travel to San Antonio and interview four Muslim refugee families from Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan, introduced to us by the Catholic Charities Refugee Resettlement Program. ("They look just like us," Cynthia marveled immediately.)
We were able to tour the Institute of Texan Cultures and the Alamo with our new friends, and our interviews yielded some fascinating stories of escape from the Taliban and conflicts with Saddam Hussein.
The book that emerged, Rewriting The Headlines, reports on the prejudice that continues to go on in our country. (see excerpts at H
After our trip, these students researched hate crimes and movies that portray Arabs and Muslims unfairly, as well as the facts behind the religion of Islam and descriptions of the refugee families we met. The children wrote vignettes about their own lives after discovering generalizations about Hispanic Americans in the media, as well as their conclusions about bigotry and hatred in the United States.
Very frank about their original prejudices, my students demonstrated through their writing that they had traversed a cultural watershed, valuing difference and seeing sameness in ways they never before considered.
Through this project, their world became much bigger – they opened their eyes to the diversity of our country – and smaller at the same time, better understanding that a person is a person is a person.
I am proud of the students of Room 12 of Myra Green Middle School because they are helping to raise awareness about prejudice and discrimination in our country. Plus, they are the authors of their own book. How many 13-year-olds can say that?
Andrew Mandel taught seventh grade English at Myra Green Middle School in Raymondville, Texas, as a 2000 Teach for America corps member.
You may purchase copies of Rewriting the Headlines by writing a check to Myra Green Middle School
C/O Elizabeth Ramirez (school librarian)
1 Bearkat Blvd.
Raymondville, TX 78580
Class sets of 10 books cost $55, and 20 books cost $110. Shipping is included. For more information, call (956) 689-2471 (x. 4312).
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