Episode 13: Noor Ali on 'the right mug' and narratives of Muslim American Youth.

Hello and welcome to St. Morra on that, a podcast for academics to talk about their policy relevant research. I'm here today with Dr. Nora Ali, who's the principal of Alhamra Academy in Shrewsbury, Massachusetts. She's a veteran teacher of 15 years in elementary and middle school. She is an assistant professor at the Worcester State University and Arizona State University. Nora is actively engaged in efforts towards social justice, interfaith dialogue, community networking and youth development. She served as a board member in the Shrewsbury Youth and Family Services and she earned her educational doctor and curriculum teaching, learning and leadership from Northeastern University. Inspired by social justice and education, her dissertation was titled "Spacemaking and Voice Finding for the Narrative of Muzzle-Memarican Youth." Thank you so much for being here today and I'm so excited to talk to you a little bit more about your research. Thank you for having me. So, to start things off, we're just going to get to know you a little bit more as a person. So can you tell us what book are you currently reading? I'm reading a book called "Simplicity Parenting." Interesting. What is the thrust of that book? It's basically about parenting children taking their lead in an environment that is inspired by the natural world. So, you know, kind of take away the everyday and the marketing of the capitalist world and let children explore the natural world around them. Oh my goodness, that sounds absolutely wonderful and I'll be definitely picking up a copy for a few friends of mine that just had their COVID babies. So what is just one thing that you are unreasonably particular about? Generally, I am unreasonably particular about the monk that I used to drink tea. Okay, are you a tall thin mug or are you kind of the like bowl with a handle on it type person? So, I have a collection of mugs and it depends entirely on the mood that I'm in, the kind of date is. So, not the same mug works in every setting. It's a pet peeve and people that I work with at school know that really well so if somebody is bringing me tea they will be like, "Which mug?" And it's the same if you come over and I'm offering you a tea, my first question is going to me, "Which mug?" Because I just think it's very important. I agree with that. I now husband makes fun of me a lot because I cannot stand kind of wide mugs because I like my drinks, I like my hot drinks to be piping hot. And if you're giving me a wide mug almost as soon as you pour the coffee or the tea it's going to be too cold for me. So I'm very much the tall thin mug proponent. But I respect that there is a time and a place for all mugs. So, our final question is how do you take your coffee? I don't, not a coffee drinker, but I drink tea. Do you have a favorite type of tea? Not really, well I like Earl Grey a lot and I like practice blends. I do like Earl Grey breakfast blend with milk, no sugar. And then I like grilled green teas and flourly teas as well, but those must be without milk and no sugar ever. Okay, I appreciate the diversity in both teas and mugs. So let's chat just a little bit about your fascinating research. So your dissertation examin' Muslim American high school seniors during the 2016 election which everyone listening to this I think knows was marked by xenophobic, sexist and Islam Afobic rhetoric. What did you find in following these students' experiences? Well, there's two ways of looking at it. One is that the 2016 election had just taken place. So the Trump administration was in charge. And here we had female Muslim American students that I was interviewing for the study. And I was really hoping that their education journeys, I was looking at their formal and informal education journeys which means, you know, stuff that's around curriculum and content. And then also the learning experience that is outside of the classroom part, outside of curriculum content, such as conversations with the adults and their lives or friends or people they engage with and extracurricular is what happened. I think it would be right to say that my findings inspired me in a way that they showcased me the resilience that these students had. Each one of them had had challenging experiences post the administration in terms of the Islam Afobic interactions that they had with people around them. But there was also a great deal of resilience that we saw in this demographic. Interesting. And I wonder if you've sort of carried over that focus on formal and informal educational experiences of Muslim American youth into the 2020 elections. In watching those elections developed, did you see any kind of similar patterns amongst the community? Yeah, so it's interesting to ask that because 2016 is when, well, 2017 is when I was, you know, I started the dissertation. And four years later, I had actually sent the same proposal that was centered around my dissertation for publishing it into a book. And, you know, I am going to be publishing in August this year, 2021 with Brittle Sense, which is an imprint of Springer. And what we're calling the book is Critical Storytelling, the narrative of the Muslim American, the female Muslim Americans. So what I did for this round was I didn't want to just take my dissertation and shape it into a book. I really wanted to add to it and I wanted to add a lot of dimension to the conversations that I had back then for years back. So I ended up reaching out to, you know, people in the demographic to see if there was interest in kind of continuing this work. And interestingly, there was far more interest from participants this time around than there was back then. So back then, because it was a narrative, inquiry, I had four participants that I was doing an in-depth study with. And when I put the call for participation out for this round, I actually ended up with people that, you know, I said, I can't take any more because I already have like 15 participants that I've spoken to, yeah, and that's just far too many. So this second round is actually people who would fall in the same age group as the ones that I did then. This time round, there were some people, obviously, if there were high schoolers, then there were people that were in college. I did feel do, you know, assembling with high schoolers as well. All participants are identified as women, as mostly American women. And you can kind of see how the conversation has evolved. You can kind of feel a little bit of a burden lifted up their shoulders. But regardless, all 15 of them had experiences to share about microaggressions that they may face. They might not have spotted outward discrimination, but definitely microaggression is a really big piece of it. And coming from a marginalized demographic, students were often not known how to recognize it or will learn how to just move on and not make a big deal of it, you know, because they think that their own experience does not have relevance to mainstream or that it's okay to just invalidate your own experience and just move on. You know, keep it pretty and easy. So that's certainly something that's still similar. I think that what the previous election did was while it brought a lot, it started like almost a 70% increase in 8 crimes against Muslims, what it also did was give voice to the opposite end of the spectrum, what people were coming to get there, to speak for marginalized people, and I think that this population is really from solace and the fact that they were so many. people who supported marginalized demographics, et cetera. So, yeah, I think it's just been an interesting study to hear their perspectives because at the end of the day, what I really wanted to do was hear their stories from them. I know that's what we weren't able to do. I love that approach of research and just, you know, centering the lived experiences of the communities that we care about is so critical. And so I'm so excited to read your book and congratulations on such a fascinating project. I'm curious to chat just a little bit more about what your research can tell us about, you know, the relationship between social justice, movement, educational spaces, students, families, kind of quotidian interactions, and educational experiences and outcomes. I mean, the topic is really a vast one, but I'll tell you one. I think a good starting point for this is why did I decide to do what I decided to do. And obviously, an obvious, you know, conclusion to draw is positionality. You know, she's Muslim-American, so it makes perfect sense to study the experiences of female Muslim-Americans. But I think that there are many layers to that positionality. One of them being at Muslim-American and part of a marginalized demographic over here in Schoen's very Massachusetts or the United States. But I was born and raised in Pakistan where I was the opposite. You know, that is where I was the mainstream and other people were marginalized. I went to a Catholic school growing up, so you know, I had that kind of a diverse experience where you were actually going to an, you know, an elite school, you can say almost, because it was run by people who were not Muslim and where you learned to speak English and you learned to think in English as well growing up. And then I ended up on the other end of the spectrum over here, where, you know, I am part of the marginalized demographic. So I think that's really important. And then another thing that really opened my eyes to this study was when I was doing my doctorate, you know, in every course that you take your ass to first introduce yourself. In the first four courses I took in the doctorate, I would introduce myself. Hey, my name's Nur. I teach at a faith-based school. I was in the principal then, so I teach at a faith-based school. And it was only until the fourth course that I took, which was a social justice and equity course, that I realized what I was doing, very, very subconsciously, unconsciously. I was not saying that I was a teacher at a Muslim school. I was saying that I was a teacher at a faith-based school. And I was doing that to kind of give myself a more generic relevance to what might have more association or connection with my colleagues in the doctorate. And that is sad on so many books, right? Oh, right. Yeah, I was a doctorate student, okay. 30-something, how old was I then? Like, 36. I was a model of two at top for 12 years. So by all means of what defines me, you can say that I am an adult. And in a group of adults who are all pursuing a terminal degree, okay. And one would think that that's a safe space or that I would feel it to be a safe space to just say it as it is and I'm a teacher at a Muslim school. So why wasn't I doing it? I was not doing that because I have learned over all 36 years at that point that you find relevance if you are mainstream. If you are not mainstream, you are irrelevant. And you learn to self-invalidate your experiences because they don't match the experience of the mainstream. So if I had something to say about, you know, my experience in education and in educator and order, if I said I like this experience, I have a Muslim school teacher. I guess I was thinking that it would not hold that much weight because that's such a modernized experience to have who cared. So I was kind of choosing that irrelevance for myself without realizing it. And that I think was the most eye-opening point of the program for me, which was to realize that lived experiences lived experience, relevance as relevance. And it doesn't matter, you know, how minor it is or whatever you are. To give shape to that. So that made me think, okay, I used to teach a bunch of 8-bit readers at that time and I was like, how about my 8-bit readers? How are they tackling exactly that's in situation? If I as an adult and struggling with that, how are they, you know, doing that? And I wear the headscar so I'm recognizable as a Muslim. Some of them don't, you know, and that's the way I do that. And how do they navigate this entire identity shaping that takes place? So one of the things I did when I asked my 8-bit readers at that time, I said, hey, how do you guys feel about 9/11? And I asked the same question four years over, four years that I don't hate played. I would ask them, they hate played, which was a graduating class from middle school. The same question, how do you feel about 9/11? I'll tell you what, 99% of the time the answer was guilty. And the irony of it is they were born after it. So there you have it, you know, we are bringing children into this world, into educational safe spaces, carrying the burden of something that they have nothing to do with except what is this guilt by association like, you know. So I'll ask them the same question now. Any time that there is, and this is really ironic, but very very true. Any time that there is a shooting that takes place in the United States or anywhere in the world, ask any Muslim what's the first thought that goes in through their minds. And the first thought is always, please don't let the perpetrator be a Muslim. The first thought is never how many victims were there, why didn't it happen? The first thought is always, who did it, please don't let it be a Muslim. Because the implications are immense for the Muslim demographic, right? Because if someone who did it as Muslim, there you have it, you're done for it, you're gonna have to take the school bus to the next day to high school, okay? How are you gonna sit on that bus where everybody is, you know, is going to be like, oh, I know this person Muslim. And the person who did whatever they did yesterday was also identified as Muslim. And we all know this is, you know, very common in media is that there are a little bit of a affiliation of anyone who does a crime, a desk commit a crime like this, if their Muslim is highlighted, very likely it's a standout point. So, you know, that's how really the conversation started, that I was like, okay, these students need to be given a platform where they can voice their own experiences. But yeah, in terms of educational spaces or whatever, you look at the experiences that these students had, those high schoolers that went to a predominantly white high school, as opposed to those students that went to the 48% white high school. Their experiences are going to be very different. Because the diversity in the campuses, what's going to really give them that kind of inclusive comfort or connection, that they would not have if they went into a high school where the district was predominantly white. So, you know, the conversations have just been startling. And one of the other things that really opened my eyes was that it was not just about being Muslim-American. It was not just about being a Muslim-American woman. It was not about being a Muslim-American woman. Where's the scar if or not? It was also intersectionally, in many ways, in the sense that it largely depended on the color of your skin as well. You know, I had students who told me that, no, I've not faced discrimination, but I know why I have not faced discrimination. I'd be like, okay, why have you not faced discrimination? And it would be like, because I can pass off as white, you know, on light skin, on fair skinned, and I pass off as white people don't know. My name is a name that can be understood to be an quote, "American name." And it's not been problematic. I had one participant who could also pass off as white, and she said that her experience had changed dramatically when she started wearing the headscarf as to when she didn't wear it, right? Because when she didn't wear it, she would just pass off as white, and everybody was okay, and you know, she was normal. But when she did start to wear it, you know, that's, that's, that's like an identifiable marker right there, and that's staring you in the face saying, "Hey, I'm Muslim." So part of the study, one of the things that I look at in the study is I call it racialization of religion, because I did all my work. It was based on critical free theory, which I get at the least. But the premise that I hold is that religion is racialized as well. And it doesn't matter what kind of ethnic or racial backgrounds Muslims are coming from all across the world. The religion itself is something that causes them to be racialized and then face systemic oppression. So that's one thing that's really big. And then the other thing that I also explore is a concept of hyphenated identities. This is a, you know, they much always qualify how Muslim or how American they are. And that's why we're always defined as Muslim-American. You can't just say she's Muslim because then you would assume that the person is not American. And if you said they were American, you would assume that they're not Muslim. Because when you think to American, you don't think Muslim. So this hyphenation of identity is really important. And then in the case of whatever their intersectional reality is, they may be a multi-hyphenated. And then whenever you have a population that is hyphenated, you will run into a conration about double consciousness. They are always going to perceive themselves with two ways. One is how they perceive themselves and the other is how others perceive them. And that always, always what happens. And the irony, of course, in being a marginalized population, like truly marginalized, is that these kids or these youths in the mainstream, they're never going to be considered American enough. If they're identified as Muslim. And unfortunately, in the Muslim community, they're most often not way to be considered Muslim enough. They're too American. So it is a, you know, it's a dichotomous kind of position to be in. And I think it's a toll order, it's a big ask to make of youth. Yet we have them navigating this every single day of their lives. I mean, they breathe this reality. And adults will oftentimes want to write the narrative for them or save a story for them, right? But they have their own stories to tell. And oftentimes, the story will surprise you at how resilient they are. You are, you know, the humor that they can see in it. Or the power that they see in it. Or the choices that they're making. To still continue to identify or not, you know. Like one of the things that I was thinking about when I did the study is, I'm asking for people who identify as Muslim American. Right? Because that, that in any case limits your sample size, right? Because there might be people who identify as Muslim American, but certainly don't want to be a part of the study that is looking for Muslim American. Or they may not be identifying as Muslim, even though they were born in a Muslim household. Because that's just too much to carry, right? Or, you know, you see this oftentimes where, you know, the youth will change their names from something that is easier on a white tongue to render. Because, oh, I just don't want to keep explaining my name. Right? So, you know, it's a tricky place to be in. But it's something that they're so, they're like, doing it without thinking, I think, almost. Yeah, it's so important to highlight this, the resiliency and creativity as well of so many of these communities in, you know, responding to just the daily hurdles that racism, sexism, and Islamophobia presents them with. And then, you know, you know, you're just trying to, to some of the policy implications of your work. You know, you've been a really active voice in the diversity, equity, and inclusion spaces. And so I'm just curious to hear a little bit about how do you think we can promote more cooperative and beneficial relationships between families, communities, social justice movements, and schools. And we have more inclusive and equitable and ultimately a more just education system. I think the first thing is that knowledge. I think that we don't acknowledge the presence of each other. And when we do acknowledge the presence of each other, we kind of are always doing it in a means of, oh, let's celebrate the color around us. If you're not going to understand the color, right? So I think that that's really important. So I think there just needs to be a lot of education around people of different faith, people of different racial backgrounds, etc. Like this year around, I'm seeing a lot on social media, a lot of people posting on, hey, you know, I'm a dance coming up. How should teachers be? What should teacher expectations be in Ramadan? If you have Muslim students in the class, right? I'm seeing a lot more of that this year than I've ever seen before. So that's that's that's that's kind of the work that needs to be done. But at the same time, I don't want to say the works done because I would be putting a superficial bandage on what the issue is, right? There are so many implicit and explicit bias stories that I have that these students faced from their teachers, or they're a theater and their lives in the school system. That it was heartbreaking. You know, like a gym teacher saying to a Muslim girl, oh, I think you could do that. You know, like why wouldn't you do that? Or, oh, I myself, when I record two under that, I was going to call your child, and so often people would say to me, oh, you barely have an accent. Like that's like a medal of honor or something that, you know, barely have an accent. Or, oh, that's a really snorke point you made. Why are we surprised that that's a really smart point to me. You know, so right. There's just so much of education that needs to be done around my professions and those types of things. The other thing that is really important, and I think that has greater implications in terms of policy is to really evaluate the curriculum. Because I think it's kind of a psychological relationship, right? The paradigm that exists shapes the curriculum and the curriculum that exists shapes the paradigm. And I think that it's deeply problematic what a majority of students in America are exposed to in terms of literature when it comes to Muslim protagonists. And I find that they need to disturb them. So if I were to ask, you know, this question of typical American high school, what literature have you read that had a Muslim protagonist? Okay. What do you think the answer is most likely going to be? It's going to be an awkward pause because they most likely have not read a book with a Muslim protagonist. Or if I said, if you watched a movie that had a Muslim protagonist. So the books that they might have read that have Muslim protagonists are going to be, I am a Lala. Most likely. They might have read I am a Lala. Or they might have read the kite tranner. Right? Well, both of those tests deeply problematic to be the first points of exposure to a Muslim protagonist. Why? Because both of those protagonists are Muslim, but not Muslim American. So by doing that, we are almost immediately setting a geographical boundary on where Muslims exist and where they can be protagonists. Right. So they can be protagonists in areas that are far away in Asia, maybe somewhere, or Africa or something. Okay. In this case, we would have been in Asia. Once it have gone, it's on the others and that's fine. What's the other thing that's special about these Muslim protagonists? What's special about these Muslim protagonists is that they are heroic because they are fighting mainstream Islam in their countries. And then the third thing that's problematic is that they win the fight when they leave those countries and are relocated to the United States or to the United States. So it is not until this white adoption takes place that they are saved. Right. And it is there heroic because they fought against fundamentalists who are all over the place in those two countries. I cannot tell you how untrue those narratives are. Right. I mean, I'm not saying that the lawless narrative is not true. The lawless narrative is true. And so is the narrative of Khaled Hussaini's protagonist that is a true narrative. But that is not the only narrative. And that is certainly not the narrative that you would introduce Muslim protagonists to a very high school Earth. Right. It's almost a convenient choice that rewrites the same stereotypical understanding, right? Like I was born and raised in Dorgor, Pakistan. Okay. That's an urban city. I went to a Catholic school. If you, it almost seems like I'm talking about an older, younger, three in terms of I'm a lot of that's also situated in Pakistan. So, so which narrative is correct? Both narratives are correct. But unfortunately, both narratives are not narratives in Muslim Americans, right? And when they're situated. And so when we introduce students to Muslim protagonists such as these two texts, we're really further removing the Muslim American experience from the conversation. Right. So, you know, I think in terms of policy, it's really important for us to take a very close look at curriculum and how we talk about the things that we talk about. You know, whether we talk about when people that were enslaved and brought to the United States, there is a whole Muslim history and identity that was also sacrificed in the same enslavement that was taking place at that time. Right. So, really acknowledging that in history, acknowledging the contributions and science, not as an afterthought or as a site or by the way, you know, before Columbus, stumbled upon this continent, Muslim from Africa had already been in, you know, all of these things are kind of like after thought or whatever the case would be. I think it's really important in terms of policy for us to evaluate how we're going to be inclusive of all people that are here, not right and narrative that is bigoted or myopic. That there's so much to chew on there. And it's, you know, I'm so grateful that there's so many thoughtful folks like yourself working on this and working to, you know, critically interrogate these narratives and how it shapes students experiences. And so, I don't want to take up too much more of your time and I would love to continue these conversations. Certainly after reading your book, which should be out this August, which I encourage everyone to, you know, preorder and get a copy of. So thank you so much for your time and for this really fascinating discussion. Thank you.