Lessons about 9/11 often provoke harassment of Muslim students

Muslim students report being teased and harassed when schools focus on 9/11. Jasmin Merdan by Amaarah DeCuir, American University Near the start of each school year, many U.S. schools wrestle with how to teach about 9/11 – the deadliest foreign attack ever on American soil. In interviews I conducted recently in the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area – one of three places where hijacked planes crashed on Sept. 11, 2001 – I found that Muslim students are often subjected to ridicule and blame for the 9/11 attacks. “Even if they’re joking around, they’ll say ‘terrorist’ and stuff like that,” one student told me. “That used to trigger me a lot.” Another student told me: “9/11, every single year, is so awkward. The administrators would be like ‘On this fateful day, this happened’… then the Muslim jokes would come up, like ‘Don’t blow us up.’ When I was younger it bothered me, but now I’m just desensitized to it.” “There’s so much tension, just being even this color and then being a Muslim, period,” yet another student told me. “It’s really strange, like, you feel it, they’re not saying it … ’You don’t understand this question because you’re Muslim,‘ which is the...