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I am worked up right now about something that came up on Twitter. Two aspects of the story piss me off: xenophobia, and that many parents couldn’t have pulled their child out of an unhealthy minority/inequality situation like I was able to do.
When we lived in Germany, my daughter Sequoia attended the local schools for Kindergarten through 2nd grade. It was supposed to be through 3rd grade, until this happened:
Sequoia was the only American student in her school, but there were other non-German children from immigrant families, including maybe a half a dozen in her class.
It was common for classroom seating to be changed around after fall and spring holiday breaks. After spring break in 2nd grade, Sequoia came home talking about a new seating arrangement. She started to name the kids in her row–the back row. She paused. She couldn’t remember the last student in her row.
But I suspected I knew exactly who it was, because as she named the students, it was becoming clear that the German kids were in the front seats and the foreigners were lined up across the back.
The next day, she came home. “I remember who it is in my row,” she said, and then named the Turkish Muslim student I’d suspected.
Now, this happened to coincide with an overwhelming influx of refugees that Germany was handling. General xenophobia was surfacing across Germany; our town was not unique. It was a conservative town, though, which exacerbated local reaction to refugees and refugee shelters. I was a founding member of a refugee support group that some folks started in town (I helped to translate flyers), but that group was small and open refugee support was uncommon.
It is also worth noting that our time in Germany coincided with a small rise in anti-American sentiment due to America getting caught spying on Germany. Many Germans also wanted American military presence out of Germany, and my husband was there attached to an Army base. Maybe there wouldn’t have been the same degree of xenophobia toward Americans if not for political tensions. Still: there still would have been anti-immigrant sentiment toward other non-Germans, and treating kids differently based on non-German-ness is wholly unacceptable. Immigrants are often treated similarly in the US–also wholly unacceptable.
It just so happened that I was chaperoning a field trip to a beekeper like a week later. On the bus on the way back, I moved to the seat next to the teacher and asked why she’d placed all the immigrants in the back of the room. She acted confused and said she didn’t think that was the case. I said, yeah, it is the case. She said she didn’t remember the seating arrangements. So I told her what they were. She was flustered and said she’d take a look at it.
The next week, seats were changed and it was basically every-other seat, German-Immigrant-German-Immigrant…
And then the class Elternbeirat (parent-teacher rep) emailed all of us class parents. Apparently, some of the other parents had complained that the new seating arrangement was not a conducive learning environment. This was the first time in two years that there had been any complaint like this. Ever.
I emailed the Elternbeirat (he was a nice guy) and told him I was no doubt the reason for the seating change. I explained the situation. He came to my home to talk about it–he was mortified. He assured me that not everyone was like that, and I knew that to be true–there were some great families in town, including a couple of parents from Sequoia’s class, and they were not xenophobes.
But the damage had been done. I was pulling my child from the school and sending her to a school designed specifically for diversity.
The next week, I informed the school that we would be withdrawing our daughter at the end of the term and placing her in the International School. From the embarrassed behavior of the principal when she explained to me that I’d need to submit a letter officially withdrawing Sequoia and provide a reason for it, it appeared that the Elternbeirat had already informed her of the situation.
However, since this was an awkward situation, with my husband coming from the US government and us submitting this letter to the German government, I didn’t want to start a whole thing, so I was diplomatic about it. I said something about the school not being the right fit as we prepare to transition our daughter for returning to the US, and the International School would be a good bridge between the school systems. I didn’t say, This teacher/school is xenophobic.
To be fair, I don’t know that this particular situation extended past our teacher. It could have been unique to her classroom. Since parents complained, though, the sentiment didn’t stop at the teacher. I hope the teacher thinks twice in the future when creating seating charts, but who knows? Since kids stayed with the same teacher 1-4 grade, those other minority students had two more years in that classroom.
At the time, we didn’t tell Sequoia our reason for pulling her out of the German school. We told her that the change was to help her transition into American schools. We’ve since told her, because I wanted her to know how minorities can be treated all around the world; and she knows we were lucky to be able to leave the situation, but many parents can’t.
To this day, I feel angry; not just about xenophobic practices, but angry that not everyone is in the position to be able to pull their kid out of a situation where they’re not equal.
And that sucks.
Blog post about an experience I had at a refugee camp here.
