Minority Student : American Schools are STILL Racist

It's already known that low-income students of color generally have less experienced teachers, but a new study from the Center for American Progress reveals they have less effective teachers, too. Students in schools with a high concentration of minorities are more than twice as likely to have an ineffective teacher than students in schools with a low minority enrollment.

Teacher quality is not distributed equitably across schools and districts. Poor students and students of color are less likely to get well-qualified or high-value teachers than students from higher-income families or students who are white.

Public school students of color get more punishment and less access to veteran teachers than their white people. Black students are suspended or expelled at triple the rate of their white people.

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Malala, Charlie, and I

I grew up listening to faint sounds of prayers in the neighborhood I lived in. It was Islam prayers, due to the majority of people in my neighborhood, or country attend to that religion. My house is located near to Mosques, I've moved twice, both houses surrounded by Mosques. I'm so used to it, it never bothers me. It was usually young kids who chants the words to a certain prayer, probably to encourage older people to go to Mosques.

A few years back, a certain Islamist group started to held a weekly mass prayers in a Mosque near my house. They would gather in the evening, a few people roll their mats open, steal a light for their lamps, and wait for the bargain for a few kopiah or peci and shirts. At first, this event bothers me, due to this gathering, the street is jammed with cars trying to get to smaller roads, clogging up my neighborhood with cars. I was a bit bothered, but then I stopped and just make it a part of my neighborhood I must make amends with.

Last year, my parents gave me a book. I've been contemplating to buy the book or not, but I finally have it in my hands. It was "I am Malala" by Malala Yousafzai, a sixteen year old Moslem girl of Pakistani descent, who strive for girls education in her environment, Swat Valley. Eventually, she got shot by the Taliban. She survived and wrote the book. I've been exposed to her character before, on the internet. She is awesome. So amazing. That was my vision of her. I began to watch her interviews on Youtube, and that felt empowering. I even felt compelled to do something.
She teaches people through her writing of her religion and how people of her ethnicity worked in their environment. Aside from how empowering she is to women and how she is such a big portrayal of feminism in the international world, she is also a big picture of her religion, Islam.
I'm a Christian and grew up a Christian. I would not say I'm a conservative kind, but my family certainly is. There are many violent groups in my country, saying their moves are based on the Koran. They threw the name of their God in everything they do. My family said it was because they're terrorists in a nutshell, they fear us because our religion is different from theirs. I was taught since I was young that, that was Islam is, and it is what it will ever be. Since I've been regularly online, my eyes are opened wide and it's such a wonderful thing.

True, living as a minority has it's troubling times. Many Churches are destroyed and it's not easy to get permission to build one, due to some disagreements with a few groups. Sometimes when I hear certain gathering talk in the area near my house, their topic is about my religion and how it's not right. Even on Youtube,  Indonesians posts videos on how a pigeon symbol is a sign of Christianization. I honestly think what both sides doing is degrading each other. Stereotyping people based on religion will never solve any pseudo problems we have with each other.

Seeing Malala's religion through her eyes changed mine as well. She felt oppressed by her own people who deciphers the meaning of Koran different than everybody else. I have that too with my religion. She talked in the book how the Koran never wrote about hurting anybody is a good thing, how love is to be shared. My religion take on the same thing.

A certain specific event happened regarding Islam in the last month. The Charlie Hebdo shooting. It was that event when people start pointing fingers on each other, mostly on terrorists, preferably Moslem terrorists. I saw inappropriate hashtags on social media, stereotyping and relating an act to a religion. But something was overlooked big time. A man who was a police or a security guard at Charlie Hebdo office, he's dead protecting the people who ridiculed his faith. Most people focused on the man who shot the cartoonists, less on the man who protected them.
My family was going on and on about the same thing about this subject, it was getting repetitive: All Moslems are terrorists, they just aren't like us. I was getting tired.

They only teach me about 1-2% of the whole Islam community. They never tell me about Malala and Ahmed, the police on the Charlie Hebdo shooting. They never tell me about the Principal of Peshawar Army Public School and how she cares for her students so much she died protecting them. I learned all this by myself. I was taught Islamophobia (a dislike of Islam) since a young age. Through these events and these people,I see what Islam is about and how dehumanizing it was of people or my family to stereotype 98% of Islam based on their perceptions of the 2%. 

That begs a bigger question.

Why do we need to group people into boxes? Why can't we just see them beyond their labels? We boxed people into religions, and in those boxes we grouped them again, and sometimes because we thought that the people in the groups in the boxes is too many, we began to just clear the groups and entitles their traits to the boxes, the religion boxes. That's what happened with Islam in our community. Not just in Indonesia, all over the world. In turn, the opposite side began to group us as well, the same thing happened. What we've done is just labeling each other and when we ran out of labels we just group them together, and called them all by the same names we think they do or they deserve.

Since when stereotyping is a good thing? That's what got us here, in this dysfunctional times in our community we called normalcy. What's more shocking is, most answers I got out of asking that exact question is "That's the way we are," I don't understand, it's much simpler, much easier to just label them than to know what's really going on beyond what we already know. Many said they don't believe everything they hear, unless they know for sure. Then, why did you let this stereotype thing going on without really knowing them for sure?

We shouldn't judge people through the prism of our own stereotypes.

Queen Rania of Jordan

People wonder why can't we just go along. And the same people are the ones who make the boxes. It doesn't take much to see what's beyond. It doesn't take much to take a piece of somebody in your heart, closer to yourself. Just look at them as humans and treat them with respect. Look beyond your own prism. 
You don't need to be in their shoes to know that they're humans, to know what they've been through. 


One less question,


I don't want to be a person who belongs only to a specific box, do you?
I bet other people is the same.


Keshia S

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