OPINION
Dear Teachers, was my name too foreign?
I’m Abdul. I’m Ahma. I’m Al Ma.
A young teacher in Austria was recently lambasted on social media after posting a video of himself reading out the names of 20 of his prospective students. The problem? He mentioned the names, addresses and social security details of students whose names sounded “foreign”. Why? Because there was no other way for him to protect the lone Austrian (sounding!) student from their future bullying.
When I heard about this case, for a split second, I felt relieved. And then ashamed.
Because this could very well have been me, back in the day. I’m a brown European with an English name-it’s foreign, all right. But the right kind of foreign. The one that suggests culture if not money, a western if not Austrian background. I could be forgiven for having an English name in a society that still prizes titles and pedigree above all else. As someone with an Indian heritage, my parents could very well have gone by a different name, something long and convoluted that sales reps would struggle to pronounce and which would always be misspelled on official correspondence.
My parents gave me the gift of fitting in-at least on paper.
Austria has seen it’s fair share of migration in the past years and has taken in more refugees per capita between the years of 2014 to 2016 than any country in the EU, excluding Germany and Sweden. You’ll be hard pressed to find someone who doesn’t have slavic roots-even the prized national foods are sourced from Eastern European neighbours. The question of migration as well as integration is polarising and has often been a political deal breaker, leading to the landslide victory of a notorious right-wing, conservative backed government that made headlines for being the first of its kind in Europe before being ousted in an ignominious manner due to political scandal (Google “Ibiza Gate” and you’ll find more than enough.).
It’s not surprising that in a country that is such a melting pot of nations, 52,2% of students living in the capital of Vienna speak a language that’s not German at home.
What is surprising, however, is that someone who writes these kind of diatribes actually taught a select number of the self-same students: “We can’t always be the ones who assimilate. We are a social country but we should not be too social.” It’s a direct quote taken from “Cultural Fights in the Classroom” (Kulturkampf im Klassenzimmer), a book written by former teacher and representative of the Austrian Educational ministry, Susanne Wiesinger.
The state of current affairs in education in Austria is lamentable. The 2019 report of the “Initiative for a discrimination free education system” (Initiative für ein diskriminierungsfreies Bildungswesen) states that 63% of those directly involved in a racist incident or on the spot at the time refused to intervene. This makes more sense considering that 41% of perpetrators are teachers themselves.
It’s not an uncommon state of affairs-just based off my own experience and what I have heard from family friends, it’s obvious the problem is fairly widespread.
I went to the type of school that is formally classed as high risk for racism yet my experience could not have been more different. A multi-cultural student body, international teaching staff and bilingual lessons held both in German and English made the brush with racism seem negligible-at least on the surface level.
What I contended with, however, was covert racial bias.
At 11, fresh from primary school, we had to be split up into learning groups for both German and English according to proficiency level. Funnily, everyone that seemed distinctly foreign ended up in the better English group and the weaker German group-regardless of the fact that all of us had been born and brought up in Austria. That class was actually called “German for Foreigners” for a year-till the school wised up to the fact that the term may be offensive in and of itself and changed it to “German as a Second Language”. As children, we laughed it up-get to do less work due to a partially wrong assessment on the part of our teachers? Yippee! 11 is not an age where you consider political correctness, thank God.
We internalised it, though.
I spent a couple years working harder than ever to be bumped up into the native German class which I finally did achieve. It became a matter of pride- I was Austrian, I’d done well so far- why shouldn’t I get to learn the same things?
You are not alone, dear Abdul, dear Ahma. All of you. I may not have faced the same vitriol you have but I know what it is to be put in a box due to one’s name and heritage, for better or worse. Sadly, it never stops.
In high school, it meant being thought of as someone who couldn’t do well in what was essentially my mother tongue and being told after holding a flawless presentation in the selfsame language that it was an “unexpected but pleasant surprise”. At University, it meant being automatically herded into a remedial class teaching English to foreigners and having to prove that I was not only fluent but proficient enough to study journalism in that language. And, more recently on the job hunt, it meant highlighting my nationality on my CV to make sure an HR professional would not automatically bin my application, convinced I couldn’t speak German.
Some of my experiences have made me understandably jaded. I have friends who often wax lyrically about the time they did their schooling. When I talk about some of the experiences I just related, the best I can hope for is passionate disbelief or cautious scepticism, the worst sympathetic pity. I know they are not trying to be callous but in the attempt to fit my experiences into their world view, things invariably get skewered and my story gets invalidated.
The news story I mentioned above is a wake-up call for all of us.
Racism is not only police violence or racial segregation-it’s also getting a different grade if your name is not Anna but Murat, sometimes even a better one out of pity for what is perceived as a lack of academic rigour considering one’s background.
Childhood is an age for exploration. We get to test the limits of who we are or ever could be and the classroom is supposed to be both the safe space and the nurturing environment we need to figure ourselves out. Yet racial bias proves an obstacle to that. When the way you look and sound like affects the schooling you receive and feeds into the expectations regarding your academic potential, we know we have failed a generation.
There is an obvious need for more diverse teaching staff. Young men and women from all backgrounds are studying to become educators yet the make-up of school staff in Austria remains largely homogeneous. This is in contrast to classes that are more heterogeneous than ever. A common language can build trust, a shared heritage understanding. Even the provision of workshops on intercultural competence for staff to bridge the gap could be helpful. At university level, we have independent procedures to rely on, questionnaires to rate our satisfaction not only with course content but delivery yet this is not the norm in a classroom-an error considering that it is our minors who need the most protection. Independent evaluators or ombudsmen to assess the level of racism in a school would be similarly helpful.
All these measures suggested in the report mentioned previously have the potential for conflict resolution and may help build a society from the ground up that values people according to the content of their character rather than something as arbitrary as their heritage.
In light of the Black Lives Matters protests around the world, it is important to take the time now to reflect on how systemic racism in an educational setting plays into the current conflict. We mourn the death of George Floyd on the account of its visceral nature but what have we done to prevent the spiritual death of our children, children that are survivors of institutional racism that does not even give them the courtesy of person-hood but chooses to denigrate them based on the nature of their names alone?
Marching in solidarity against global racism is one thing but acknowledging the birth of racial prejudice at our own doorstep is a wholly different matter. One that needs to be tackled if we wish to prevent the future deaths of our very own George Floyd’s and Emmet Till’s.
