Like most 12-year-olds, my sister Anna is pretty impressionable. Being seven years older, I have an undeniable presence in her life as a big sister, which manifests itself in a variety of amusing ways. I’ll never forget the day she came home in a huff, plopped on the couch, heaved a sigh, and with an appropriately emphatic eye roll, dramatically muttered in her high-pitched, fifth-grade voice, “”Tyler is such a chauvinist pig!””
Sometimes imitation really is the highest form of flattery.
But even though I may have a certain sway over my beloved little pre-adolescent sister, there are other influences that come up in the day-to-day life of a middle-schooler that are slowly but surely wedging their way into Anna’s head. Of course, the biggest impact on Anna’s mindset is the same one that first encouraged me to be an individual, to think for myself, to be wary of the masses: my parents.
Parents have a huge impact on their children, more so than any other entity. Regardless of which side of the “”nature versus nurture”” argument you choose to defend as the precursor of a child’s behavior, parents are usually to blame. They more or less determine the religious beliefs, political persuasions, eating habits, sleeping patterns and social behavior of their offspring almost uninterruptedly throughout adolescence.
That’s why I was so heartbroken and disturbed to hear about the cancellation of an assembly on Islamic culture at Anna’s middle school due to the insistence of a handful of angry and incredibly ignorant parents.
Halmid Havani, the director of Muslim affairs for the University of California, was scheduled to come to my sister’s school and speak about Muslim culture. It was exactly what needed to happen: basic education about a different culture for a bunch of middle school students who needed to learn.
The first warning sign was the fact that students had to have a signed permission slip to attend the assembly. That alone made me mad. This isn’t sex education, and it’s not dangerous, violent, distasteful or scandalous. This is knowledge, pure and simple. It’s why we send our children to school in the first place. It’s the basis of education — giving someone the chance to learn.
But the fun didn’t stop there. In one of the most disgusting portrayals of perpetuating narrow-mindedness that I’ve ever seen, a group of parents got together, protested the assembly, and the entire thing was cancelled. The main mystery for me is exactly how an entire group of adults managed to convince themselves, let alone anyone else, that any harm could come from Havani’s lecture. I simply can’t wrap my mind around just how ignorant someone would have to be to consider this assembly something that needed to be stopped. This isn’t some random guy hopping on a soapbox spewing haphazard theories on racial tensions, but a legitimate, college-level speaker on a lecture circuit who merely wanted to educate. This isn’t a case of someone out to poison the youth of America with a challenge to American values, but the chance to save a group of kids from falling into a cycle of ignorance.
More than anything else, the whole thing makes me sad. Here was an opportunity to educate a few hundred eager minds. It was all the more important in light of the fact that this assembly meant the chance for someone to clearly deny the myths and affirm the realities behind a culture that has been the subject of so much falsehood and hate, so much misplaced and misguided anger.
Even now, two weeks after the assembly was scratched, it makes me angry just thinking about the sheer intolerance that it must have taken to call the whole thing off. I’m angry precisely because my little sister is so very impressionable, because it is all too easy for her to be sucked into some ridiculously small-minded thinking about an entire society through no fault other than a lack of education. Instead of being given the ability to identify prejudice and stereotypes in the future, she is all the more susceptible to them, all the more likely to be unable to distinguish between fact and fiction when it comes to looking at cultural identity.
Kids are our only hope. When I see Anna stand up to her friends for making a racist or sexist comment, it sparks in me a glimmer of hope that things are changing. But nothing will change if parents are determined to keep their children from learning.
Through their inability to see past their own racism and paranoia, these parents have denied their children the chance to grow beyond such narrow-mindedness. It’s a sad enough thought that there are actually people with that degree of ignorance in the world.
What’s even scarier is that without education, without opportunities such as Havani’s presentation, there’s no chance for the cycle to be broken. Children are impressionable; it’s up to parents to create a sense of tolerance and open-mindedness in their children. If they choose instead to stand in the way of their children’s ability to learn and grow, then there is nothing to stop the cycle of hate. And that’s the scariest thing of all.
