Mental Health and Muslims
The article, “Coping with the Persistent Trauma of Anti-Muslim Rhetoric and Violence” is discussing the potentially long lasting mental health issues being caused by today’s anti-Muslim society. This is important to pay attention to, because less than 100 years ago a Fascist dictator by the name of Adolf Hitler was advocating for an anti-Jewish world, and that started not only the second World War, but a horrible extermination of millions of people.
The two content standards that this article and activity connect to are the first, “Content Standard 1 — Students access, synthesize, and evaluate information to communicate and apply social studies knowledge to real world situations,” and the fourth, “Content Standard 4 — Students demonstrate an understanding of the effects of time, continuity, and change on historical and future perspectives and relationships.” The Grand Challenge that this connects to is “Valuing World Cultures.” Some questions students could ask after reading this are: “What are Muslims?” or, “Why do Muslims deserve to be treated well when they caused 9/11?” or, “Why are Muslims all so hated?”
The activity I would like to do with this article in my classroom is to use the collaborative conversations method from our 50 Routines book. I would start the activity by reading through the article as a class. Then I would write some guiding questions on the board like, “If you were a Muslim facing this today, how would you handle the hate?” and, “Does this article remind you of any specific topic that we’ve studied in this class?” This activity would have to come after a lesson on WWII so that students would be able to identify the similarities between the two more easily. As discussions begin to rise I would play the devil’s advocate and push for anti-Muslim laws to be passed just as Hitler did to the Jews, which would highlight the connections between the two and help students see what is happening not even a century after the atrocities of WWII. I would also like to project pictures of SS soldiers being violent towards Jews during the Holocaust as well as white supremacists being violent towards Muslims during today’s society.
