In Age of Trump, Minority Students Feel Vulnerable to Harassment

Senior Aya Ali is a Muslim-American whose family is from Lebanon. She chooses to wear a hijab headscarf.

In a public school with few recognizably Arab students, she stands out from the crowd.

“I’m the only girl who wears the hijab in the entire building,” she said. “It’s the most obvious sign that I am a Muslim. It is very obvious that people are intimidated by me.”

In Feb. and March, both Ali and sophomore Elena Torres were the subjects of hateful language, targeting them for their religious, cultural or ethnic identities.

These incidents echo the national political discourse in which xenophobic language has become increasingly acceptable. In Ali’s case, she spoke back on social media to those who target her for her ethnic origins and religious beliefs.

First, in late Feb., Ali’s friends told her they heard prejudiced comments other students were making about her.

“I was called a terrorist,” Ali said. “When I heard that certain people in my school were talking behind my back about my hijab and my race in general, I was upset.”

“However, I looked at all my friends, and the number of people who support me and respect me; I started focusing on the positive, which gave me more confidence,” she added. “Not only that, but my hijab is a constant reminder to me of who I am, no matter what anyone else says.”

Ali felt that the students who were talking about her did not know her as a person, and that they hated her because of her religion.

But in the age of Donald Trump, where does political speech end and hate speech begin?

According to an April 13 report from the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), “The Trump Effect” has been on the rise nationwide, so much so that many immigrant students fear being deported.

“Teachers have noted an increase in bullying, harassment and intimidation of students whose races, religions or nationalities have been the verbal targets of candidates on the campaign trail,” the report stated.

Additionally, the Southern Poverty Law Center reported that more than two thirds out of approximately 2,000 K-12 teachers surveyed have reported a rise in Muslim and black students’ concerns with the rise of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump. One-third of the 2,000 teachers surveyed have seen a rise in anti-Muslim and anti-immigration sentiment.

According to Frank LoMonte, Executive Director of the Student Press Law Center (another organization with the acronym SPLC), not all hateful language can be defined as hate speech.

“The Supreme Court has told us numerous times, including in the case of the Westboro Baptist Church’s anti-gay hate speech, that speech does not lose its constitutional protection just because it is insulting or offensive,” he wrote in an email. “For speech to lose its protection, it must be threatening or harassing — something that actually inflicts significant discomfort that makes a targeted recipient feel unsafe.”

“Political speech is of course the most highly protected category of speech, and there is no hard-and-fast line where ‘political speech’ ends and ‘hate speech’ begins,” LoMonte added. “Calling for a ban on Muslims entering America for purposes of preventing terrorism is pretty clearly political speech that has entered the mainstream political dialogue at the highest national levels, even though some listeners may also regard it as hateful.”

In Ali’s case, the comments were not made to her face, but they did affect the way she felt about coming to school.

“[I] still became very uncomfortable and upset with the things that were being said about me by people who have never gotten to know me,” Ali said. “Not only that, but being an Arab and Muslim American girl is very hard. Especially since I am a minority, not just in my community but in the country.”

Once Ali heard that people were stereotyping her, she made the administration aware of what had happened, but it seemed to her that there were no consequences for the students who called her names.

“I [went] to [Principal Dr. Ed Klein] first, but it didn’t seem like he was taking much action,” she said.

Due to the Family Educational Rights of Privacy Act (FERPA), a law protecting students’ educational records, administrators are unable to share information about student discipline.

LoMonte might point out that the fuzzy line between political speech, which is protected, and hate speech, which is not, leaves administrators in a tight box.

In March, Ali decided to confront the alleged perpetrators on Twitter by tagging one of them in a tweet that she had already posted.

“Ignorant people calling me terrorist behind my back at school, but I’m just doing me and getting cuter every day,” the tweet stated.

The next morning, she said she offered to take the tweet down after Principal Dr. Edward Klein questioned her.

Around the time of the Donald Trump rally in Cleveland, Ali tweeted that Trump supporters “should have their tires slashed.”

“[Klein] gave me a lecture and was making it seem like I was attacking multiple people on Twitter,” Ali said, “[which] made me feel invalidated. [Klein] said the ‘situation was under control’, but now I ‘have made myself involved’, even though I’ve always been involved.”

In mid-March, the same perpetrators allegedly sent videos to sophomore Elena Torres using another student’s phone. The videos told her her to “hop off the [expletive] train you [expletive] annoying person… go away, go the [expletive] away.”

Torres’ family is from Puerto Rico, an American protectorate, and Torres identifies as a political liberal. She felt that the videos targeted her for both her ethnic identity and her political beliefs.

“[In the videos,] they have personally attacked not only my political views, [but] they’ve also attacked my heritage and where I come from,” Torres said. “In the first video, which I was not able to save, they told me to go back to Puerto Rico…This isn’t the first time they’ve [harassed someone], and I know it won’t be the last.”

According to LoMonte, the language in the video may not be protected by the First Amendment.

“A video that calls out a specific student by name and tells her to ‘go home’ or ‘go back where she came from’ based on her ethnicity certainly does not sound like political speech,” he wrote. “And it may well cross the line into punishable harassment, depending on the exact wording and how it was sent, and whether it was accessed at school.”

Harassment depends in part on how the hurtful speech was delivered.

“‘Harassment’ is a very fact-specific issue and a lot of it depends on the method of speaking,” LoMonte continued. “Speech that is personally sent to you in an intrusive way that you can’t avoid, like repeated text messages to your phone, is regarded as a more severe form of harassment than just gossiping about you behind your back.”

Torres’ father, Asst. Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Jose Torres, took matters into his own hands by filing a police report with the Beachwood Police Department. The link is only to the cover page; The Beachcomber also obtained the full report through a public records request.

“[My father] felt as if this problem was far beyond the school,” Elena Torres said. “This is because the attacks [seemed] to be a continuous thing. We saw it with [Ali], and [then] with me.”

As a result of the police report, Beachwood Police Officer C.J. Piro, the school district’s director of security, spoke to the alleged perpetrators.

“[They] were advised that any further contact with [Elena] Torres may result in criminal action being taken as well as discipline from the school,” Piro wrote in the full police report. “[Elena] Torres was advised to discontinue texting or social media contact with [the alleged perpetrators].”

“The discrimination [is] based on religious, cultural and ethnic backgrounds,” Torres’ father said. “We’re not talking about an isolated incident, [either].”

Klein has confirmed that the administration has done an independent investigation.

“Any time we have an incident that involves students, that’s treated with confidentiality,” he said.

“Any complaints regarding race … are treated with the utmost respect. … I can tell you that the school has investigated complaints from all parties that have been involved.”

“However…  we cannot provide you any information regarding the school’s response to any of these incidents because of FERPA,” he stated in an email.

Social studies teacher Pam Ogilvy attributed recent incidents–both nationally and here at Beachwood–to Trump’s influence.

“I would argue within the last three months, … [this rise of prejudiced comments in the school and nationally have] run concurrently with this age of Donald Trump. That’s undeniable,” she said.

Ogilvy followed up with administrators about the incidents perpetrated against Ali.

“With [Ali] in front of me,” Ogilvy said, “I emailed the administration, I emailed her guidance counselor and I was like ‘Enough is enough. We have to do something about this.’”

Ali and Ogilvy became close last school year when Ali was a student in Ogilvy’s United States government class.

“[Ali] would pop in to talk about comments that were made about her or around her or to friends of hers that were disparaging, hasty generalizations that linked her with groups that she has nothing to do with,” Ogilvy said.

Ali’s own political speech has been criticized by students in the school who criticized her choice of research paper.

“My paper was specifically about the Israeli-Palestinian border,” she said. “It is bigger than the Berlin Wall; however, it is never talked about.”

Her choice of topic was informed in part by her Middle-Eastern identity and empathy for the plight of the Palestinian people. In a school with a high number of Jewish students, the topic has drawn some criticism.

“I think Beachwood students need to learn to view other people’s perspectives,” Ali said. “I think that’s why some of these people do not like me. They aren’t used to exploring perspectives other than their own.”

Whether these incidents are driven by religious, ethnic, or political divisions, many students and teachers feel they are alarming because they run counter to the culture of acceptance at BHS.

“This building is supposed to be a safe place for everybody in it to feel comfortable and not worry that they will get yelled at for expressing their beliefs or even just sitting there,” Ogilvy said. “If it’s not safe for one person, it’s not safe for anybody. It’s not okay.”

Klein finds these incidents troubling, but views them as isolated.

“While I personally find the individual behaviors concerning, the isolation of these incidents does not suggest widespread ‘political, ethnic, religious…’ tensions,” he wrote in an email. “And while these incidents are isolated, and do not suggest there are ‘tensions in the school building,’ we are in the planning stages regarding programming to enhance our community.”

The alleged perpetrators of these incidents were contacted for this story, but declined to comment.