Two weeks after New York City announced that its schools would observe the principal Muslim holidays, another school district in the State of New York signaled that Islamophobia in America, and its classrooms, was hardly on the decline.
On Wednesday March 18th, a student at Pine Bush High School recited the American Pledge of Allegiance in Arabic. The exercise was part of the School’s “National Foreign Language Week,” an event held to celebrate the “many races, cultures and religions that make up [the U.S. and the Pine Bush] School District."
However, an event celebrating American multiculturalism and pledging patriotism was immediately met with anger and offense - driven by the conflation of the Arabic language with Islam, and in turn, inassimilability, violence and terrorism. The controversy sparked by the “Arabic pledge” highlights, very vividly, how different dimensions of Arab or Muslim identity – even language – are conflated with threat. And more audibly, how even reverent attempts to reconcile Arab or Muslim culture with American identity incites zeal and scorn.
The Limits of American Multiculturalism
The Pine Bush pledge of allegiance controversy has also revitalized discussion of the tolerable scope of multiculturalism within American schools. Namely, which languages or cultures are deemed acceptable for students to celebrate at school – and which ones are considered pariahs?
This controversy, juxtaposed with NYC’s plans to observe the Muslim holidays, illustrates that the answers to this question are more complex than clear. Indeed, languages – like Arabic and English – are more than merely systems of communication. They are symbols, expressions of membership, and perhaps most saliently, religious and racial proxies.
Arabic, in past and present in America, does not only signal foreignness, but also an inextricable nexus to Islam, the Middle East, and the Orient. Spheres positioned as America’s geopolitical and normative rival.
Several languages – primarily European ones such as French or Italian, for instance – are deemed assimilable with English. And therefore, American culture and its classrooms. However, other languages such as Chinese or Spanish are frequently branded as alien, inferior, and menacing. The former associated with long-embedded tropes of Asian hostility and subversion, and the latter linked to intense xenophobia and nativism.
However, Arabic – and the maligned entities and ideas it is associated with – stands heads and shoulders above (other foreign languages) as linguistic pariah. While the pledge recited in Chinese or Spanish may have caused a minor stir, its’ reading in Arabic – as illustrated this past week at Pine Bush High School – rose to the level of national alarm and outrage.
A degree of zeal that matches the still climbing heights of Islamophobia on America’s streets. Which, unfortunately, is still being taught within the vast majority of its schools. While NYC’s decision to observe the Muslim holidays offers a much heartening exception, Pine Bush – exactly two weeks after that unprecedented step forward – still stands as the unequivocal rule.
Read the full article at: http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2015/03/pledging-allegiance-islamophobia-classrooms-150322050951640.html
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