I was in the post office a few weeks ago when I overheard an odd conversation. It was something about how a woman was sending long pants to her daughter in Florida. At first, I decided to ignore it, yet it is hard to not listen to two rather enraged people talking about pants. Eventually, I decided to actively listen to the conversation. Why would someone talk so loudly if they didn't want anyone listening?
I quickly caught myself up. This woman's daughter was a pre-med student at some college in central Florida and her biology teacher asked all his students to wear long pants to class. This is when I heard something a little shocking. Apparently, the woman's daughter's biology teacher was Middle Eastern and for some reason the woman, the postal employee and someone else in line assumed he was Muslim and he was making the students wear long pants because of his religion.
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As the conversation got louder and angrier and more Islamophobic, I had one question "What makes you think the teacher is doing it because of his religion?" or more importantly "How do you know the teacher is Muslim?" Before I could insert myself into the conversation, the other postal worker asked it for me.
"Well, [woman's daughter's name] says he speaks with an accent and has a beard. And why else would he make them wear long pants? It's not chemistry." Ignoring the problem with the first part of the answer for the moment, doesn't it make sense to wear long pants in biology, too? Isn't that the class where you have to dissect pigs and stuff? I'm obviously not a science major.
By this point, the woman who started the whole conversation had left, but everyone was still talking about it. I walked up to the postal worker who had been very aggressively involved in the conversation and handed him my package.
"What do you think about all this?"
"I don't know, I mean I would probably wear long pants to a biology class. I think lab work is a major part of that class." I was hoping this would more or less stop his line of questioning.
"All I know is if some Muslim tried to make me obey his religion, I would start kicking asses."
"Did the teacher say it was because of his religion?"
"Not that I know of, but he still shouldn't be making his students do things because he is a Muslim." This answer was rather bizarre and as I left the post office, I wondered how someone could acknowledge that he didn't know something and yet act as it was fact in the same sentence. I also regretted that I hadn't done more to try and stop an anti-Muslim tirade by a government employee.
I have never really encountered such a situation before and I spent hours pondering it in my mind. Why did everyone bring it to a religious level when (as far as I knew) there was no evidence it was religiously motivated? It makes sense to wear solid clothing in a lab science class; furthermore, not college or university professor could get away with making students wear clothing because of his religion. I couldn't even imagine a professor having the gall to contemplate such a thing.
I also thought about how I could have handled the situation better, did I not do enough to prevent such a quick a Islamophobic response? To this, I thought, yes. I could have done much more. Sure, I said a few things to the postal worker to try and make him rethink things, but I was coy about it. I wasn't upfront about what I viewed as a problem.
I worried that if I said something, it would have come across as just as aggressive as I thought the situation was, but it didn't need to be. I could have easily brought up how there was a logical reason for why the pants were needed and how jumping to the conclusion that was currently being jumped to, they were just getting themselves angry. And what is worth, they were placing the image of an intolerant Muslim in their mind that could easily become a full-fledged prejudice (if they didn't have one already.)
Now it's easy to say what I should have done when I can't do it anymore. It is much harder to actually stand up against dangerous ideas in the moment, but if we never do it, we will never fix anything. We have to challenge ourselves to sacrifice our social comfortably to prevent discrimination against people that are just trying to live their lives.
