NEW YORK: Thursday morning, dropping my son off for his first day of school, I saw a notice put up by the representative of the Parent Teacher Association. Among other activities she was encouraging parents to undertake was participation in one called “Diversity Matters.”
“We changed the name from ‘Perspectives on Diversity’ to ‘Diversity Matters’ to show that we want to be more pro-active,” the PTA representative explained.
People living outside of the United States might not appreciate quite how much “diversity” has become the secular religion of liberal American culture. It means, in the words of the PTA flier, “fostering respect and building inclusiveness” among people who have come to America from different backgrounds - nothing objectionable certainly.
And so in public and private schools across the United States, diversity committees have meetings, read books, hear speakers and talk. I don’t know yet what Diversity Matters at my son’s current school will be like, but if it’s anything like the diversity presentations I attended at a different school last year, it will feel, to me at least, a bit like compulsory chapel, a mandatory exercise in sensitivity and virtuousness.
But never mind. We’ve come a long way in this country from the days when there were privileged whites on one side and everybody else on the other, and I’m a grateful beneficiary of the change.
What is interesting at the moment is that some difficult questions about an unexpected sort of diversity have been coming up in New York’s schools lately, showing that diversity does matter and that it’s not always easy.
I wrote a few months ago about a bitter debate in New York over a new school to be called the Khalil Gibran International Academy, an Arabic-English dual-language middle school scheduled to start up with its first 60 students this year.
At the time, the school’s principal, a Yemen-born educational professional named Debbie Almontaser, who wears an Islamic head scarf, was under deep, though baseless, suspicion that she was a secret agent of Islamic terrorism.
Despite that concern, the school, which is to stress Arabic language and culture, opened on schedule Tuesday, and, interestingly, according to a spokesman at the Department of Education, most of the 60 11-year-olds in the charter class were not Arabs or Muslims, but black and Hispanic.
Why? As one student said on television, she already speaks English and Spanish, and she thinks it’s cool that when she is 13 she will speak Arabic as well.
In other words, there is no sign so far that the school will turn out to be a taxpayer-supported little headquarters for Al Qaeda in the middle of Brooklyn.
But, sadly, the school opened without Almontaser, whose brainchild the school is. Three weeks ago, after a campaign that can only be described as vicious, she voluntarily stepped down as principal.
What happened was this: in mid-August, a group of Muslim women in Brooklyn with no connection to the Khalil Gibran Academy were selling T-shirts that said “Intifada NYC” on them. The group was given office space by a foundation of which Almontaser is a board member.
Asked by The New York Post to comment, Almontaser seemed to want to express the opinion that the woman’s group, despite the word “intifada” on the shirt, did not advocate a violent uprising in New York.
“The word basically means ‘shaking off,’ ” Almontaser said.
It was an error of judgment on her part, probably an error of somebody not used to speaking to reporters. In other words, given a chance to denounce Arab violence - the intifada, after all, is synonymous with the Palestinian uprising in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza - she blew it, playing into the hands of those who were out to get her anyway.
Sure enough, the headline in The Post (which is owned by Rupert Murdoch, who, in something of an irony, sends two of his children to a Chinese-English dual-language program in Manhattan) was “Intifada Principal,” and the headline was followed by a series of editorials, one of them titled “How do you say in Arabic, ‘Close It Down.’ ”
What does it all mean? For one thing, the episode occasions a thought about the meaning of diversity, and its limitations. What we really mean by diversity is welcoming children of color into classrooms that used to be mostly white, and ensuring that the contributions and the historic experiences of blacks, Hispanics and other minorities are included in the curriculum.
Well and good. But what becomes of our principles when we are confronted with a pricklier sort of diversity represented by Muslims? A lot of us aren’t too comfortable with that.
The second thing the incident exposed: the readiness of the post 9/11 American debate to descend into a kind of hate-mongering and hysteria.
The New York Times, in its report on the reopening of public schools last week, quoted a certain Rabbi Aryeh Spero on Thursday to the effect that, in supporting the Arab-English program, the New York mayor and schools chancellor, or superintendent, (both of whom happen to be Jewish) have become “part of a program to destroy the American public school system.”
Sixty children learning Arabic in public school are going to destroy the American public school system? Nonsense, of course, but Spero’s remark was calm and sober compared with some of the accusations heard lately - that, for example, Osama bin Laden must have been overjoyed to hear that the Khalil Gibran Academy was being created, as one Web site comment had it.
On the contrary, the Khalil Gibran Academy was actually bad news for bin Laden, because it put the lie to the notion that America is monolithically hostile to Arabs and Muslims. It showed that we are, to use that word again, genuinely diverse, not just diverse when there’s no courage required for it.
Indeed, the organized hysteria and vitriol that set the trap that Almontaser fell into was itself a kind of terrorism. We were behaving exactly the way Muslim radicals say we behave, and that’s harmful both to the goal of diversity and to the national interest.
