How To Help Your School Aged Child Handle Religious Discrimination

For imigrant Muslim children, the hostility created by current political rhetoric can be overwhelming, particularly if teachers at school are insensitive. There is the now famous case of the intelligent young Muslim student who built a clock, took it to school to show his science teacher and was arrested. She was afraid he had built a bomb.  Really? African American children have been mistreated in schools for over a century, made to sit in the back of the class, overly punished and suspended, so bad treatment by teachers and principals is nothing new; but to have administrators fear your child as a terrorist is a whole different twist when it comes to irrational prejudice. How do parents help their children cope with sometimes not so thinly veiled hostility based on religious prejudice? Our guests today, Imam Azam Akram and his wife Faiza discuss how their work in the South Side community of Chicago helps remove barriers of racial and religious prejudice, and how they prepare their elementary aged children to cope with society's atttudes toward immigrant Muslims.