A little over three months ago we launched this column and I told you all that I was hoping to have a dialogue, sometimes uncomfortable, about the issues in our community.
I also told you that I was hoping to hear from you all as long as you were respectful.
Fortunately, many of you have taken me up on that, and reading some of your emails has been one of the highlights of this experience thus far.
So, I wanted to try something a bit different with this column. Let’s call it a quarterly check-in of sorts, where I share a couple of things that I have learned from readers like you.
Readers regularly offer interesting insights into the topics I write about. That was especially true when it came to questions I raised about extremism in the military, including whether the military is really capable of addressing it.
Many of our local veterans not only pointed out aspects of the problem I hadn’t thought about, but also solutions that never crossed my mind.
Pete, a reader who served in the Navy for 10 years and then worked more than 30 years as a civilian for the Navy, shared that he believes the military is capable of combatting extremism in its ranks, but it will take a concerted effort and actions that may be viewed as unpopular.
“Doing a deep dive into social media will be one place to start, and that will undoubtedly raise privacy questions,” Pete said. “Mandatory training and setting up hotlines to report extremism should be a continuing program across the DoD.”
He added that doing more to encourage an if-you-see-something-say-something mindset when encountering extremism or racism will be necessary, and that needs to be promoted across every rank.
Along those same lines, Lou, another Navy veteran, said he’d like to see clear action taken to better protect service from retribution in the event they do witness and report inappropriate behavior.
Another thing I’ve learned from you all is that sometimes what I don’t say in a column can be just as impactful as what I do say.
This is something I have been thinking about a lot after I wrote a few months ago about California’s debate over developing an ethnic studies curriculum.
Last month California’s Board of Education officially adopted a high school ethnic studies curriculum, which interested high schools can use to develop their own ethnic studies courses. The curriculum remains controversial, though, and received significant criticism from Jewish and Arab American groups.
When I wrote about it in February, the curriculum’s substance was still being debated. My intention was to say that while it’s true the proposed curriculum was imperfect and had room for improvement, adopting a curriculum was something that was sorely needed, and we shouldn’t let shortcomings or bad actors prevent us from getting this thing off the ground.
Essentially I felt that it was more important to adopt something and improve it as we go than to have an ethnic studies program continue to stall, as it had for the last several years.
In retrospect I realize I made a mistake in the column though — not a factual error but a mistake of omission that unintentionally sent the wrong message to our Arab American and Middle Eastern communities.
While conveying some of the concerns that had been raised about an ethnic studies curriculum I wrote, “Some also have argued that groups like Jewish Americans, Arab Americans, Pacific Islanders and Sikh Americans aren’t represented enough.”
I didn’t think anything of it and wrote it that way because I thought it was a quick way to reference some of the other valid concerns being raised.
What I didn’t realize was that by not saying more, I had failed to clearly illustrate how some of those groups had been shortchanged — particularly folks in our Arab American and Middle Eastern communities, whose histories had been in the curriculum originally and then were removed because of outside pressure.
Specifically, I did not address how the original inclusion of Palestinian history and the Palestinian American experience was removed to the extent that some in the community criticized the curriculum that was ultimately adopted as being a “whitewashed, anti-Palestinian Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum.”
Fortunately some folks in the community, including one reader who had a lengthy phone conversation with me, showed me why they were hurt; by not describing their concerns we were minimizing them.
It was very informative. And I think it will improve my coverage of ethnic studies in the future, as well as broadly make me more conscious about what I am saying by not going into detail about certain things.
Also, in a broader sense, this conversation and many other exchanges about unrelated topics have been good reminders for me to not become instantly defensive when I receive certain .
Given the nature of what I write about — race, identity, justice — I get a lot of hostile emails. But I also get a lot of really thoughtful emails too, including emails from people who disagree with me.
All of these emails are valuable because you all motivate me to be as thoughtful as I can be as I write and you get me to constantly evaluate how I am communicating. You help me become better aware if the message I’m trying to send is actually being perceived the way I intended.
So, although I don’t respond to each and every email, I want to thank you for engaging and for opening the door to some incredible conversation.
