“Terrorist.” The last place you would expect to hear this accusation would be in an elementary school classroom. But it wasn’t a scenario unfamiliar to senior and Iranian-American Ariana Ebrahimi.
“Many people assume extremely outdated things about my country,” Ebrahimi said. “I got called a terrorist in elementary school a lot because of the food I would bring to school and cyberbullied online because of posting in support of my people.”
Ebrahimi’s father faced a lot of racism when he immigrated to the United States from Iran in 1997, including discrimination during work and a dragged-out immigration process.
In 2021, California became the first state to require students to take an ethnic studies course to better educate students about the histories and cultures of minority communities. Under this new law, high schools must offer an ethnic studies course by the 2025-26 school year, and mandate it as a graduation requirement by the 2029-30 school year.
However, the MENA (Middle Eastern North African) Club has been petitioning for MENA history to be included in the Paly curriculum, despite the MENA population still categorized as “white” in data collected by the U.S. Census Bureau. This issue has also been an ongoing conversation on the statewide level concerning the inclusion of Palestinian and Israeli narratives in the class. This categorization thereby excludes the group’s history from being covered in the ethnic studies course outside of the Arab-American unit that some believe wrongly conflate all Middle Easterners as “Muslims” or “Arabs.”
The Palo Alto Unified School District has begun discussing and planning the curriculum and implementation of this course, separate from the existing ethnic studies elective available to upperclassmen. The state law gives school districts flexibility with content and teaching style to determine how the course will be implemented.
“In the design of this course at this point, the plan is that there will be a lot of student choice designed into each unit,” said Mary Sano, a Paly teacher on the Ethnic Studies Committee. “For example, if a student feels like they really want to explore on their own, there will be opportunities for that.”
Nikki Heydarpour, a co-president of the MENA Club at Palo Alto High School, explains what the MENA Club is advocating for.
“We want to try to deconstruct misconceptions about the MENA region and to shed a positive light on our culture and history,” Heydarpour said. “By incorporating that into the ethnic studies program, which is already currently being reconstructed and redeveloped, we hope to get other students who aren’t of MENA descent to question some misconceptions that they may already have about MENA culture.”
The MENA Club has been working on this issue since March and has already attended a school board meeting to advocate for the inclusion of MENA history.
“We’ve been working on it throughout the summer, and into the school year as well, because it [our AP Seminar project] just inspired us and really made us realize how much of a difference we want to make and how important adding representation is,” Mariam Tayebi, club co-president, said.
Although the MENA population has a “white label” in the U.S. Census, Heydarpour explains why PAUSD should include MENA history in the ethnic studies requirement.
“In 2030, Biden made proposals to consider the MENA group as a minority,” Heydarpour said. “Given that we are probably going to be considered a minority group, they’re going to have to include us as of 2030, so might as well start now.”
The state law suggests that this course requirement should develop a curriculum that “best addresses local student needs” by considering the relative sizes of local ethnic groups, a [suggestion] that PAUSD is taking into account when designing the course.
“We’re looking at our community, and what makes up our community more — not that we’re not going to look at the bigger picture — of course we will — but the focus is really meant to be very locally focused,” Sano said. “So who are we actually in our community, and what makes up the diversity and the different race and ethnicity and cultures of our own community.”
Some critics of the ethnic studies requirement claim that there isn’t enough space in the semester-long course to include a comprehensive unit on each ethnic group. However, Heydarpour disagrees.
“I think that it’s unfair to say that a whole entire group which encompasses 22 different, diverse nations should be exempt from a program merely because there isn’t enough space,” Heydarpour said. “If there isn’t enough space, they should make more space.”
Tayebi clarifies that this inclusion of MENA history would focus on the experiences of Americans of MENA descent, not foreigners.
“It’s really important to reiterate the fact that this is focusing on American individuals and has nothing to do with foreign politics,” Tayebi said. “It’s mainly just about the contributions of Americans and not just World History.”
American media often focuses on the foreign governments of MENA countries, portraying them in a negative light, with less coverage about the MENA population in the United States. For instance, Hoda Osman, president of the New York-based Arab and Middle Eastern Journalists Association, claims that American media coverage of Middle Eastern victims dehumanizes them. Heydarpour has experienced this bias throughout her daily life.
“For me, as an Iranian-American, my nationality is distilled to politics,” Heydarpour said. “There’s never talk about my culture or history whenever I hear other people talking about Iran, it’s always about the politics and what’s going on, and especially in a very negative light.”
Sano says what the main objective of the ethnic studies requirement is for the school district.
“Our hope is that it would make it more a part of the systems, of Paly and of Gunn, of being more intentional and being more sensitive and being more tolerant and being more celebratory of each other and being able to converse together and being able to listen to each other,” Sano said.
Heydarpour explains that the MENA club’s main fight is to challenge the common misconceptions of MENA individuals.
“I think that just initiating the representation of us is really important,” Heydarpour said. “Getting individuals to question their misconceptions is really important because a lot of people just adopt them without even trying to think about it.”