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Arab, Gay Students Most at Risk

By Kim Kozlowski
Detroit News
Posted on Tuesday November 18, 2003

Gay and Arab-American students face the most discrimination in Metro Detroit schools, according to a poll commissioned by the Skillman Foundation that surveyed the perceptions of local youth.

More than a third of the 12- to 17-year-olds who were surveyed said that Arab and Chaldean students faced a lot or some discrimination in school while gay students face even more: Nearly half of those polled said gays face discrimination a lot or some of the time.

Alixandrea Rivera, a 12-year-old Dearborn Heights middle school student who is half Mexican, said she hasn’t faced discrimination in her school, but she sees it sometimes.

“Just because someone is different doesn’t mean they’re really different,” Rivera said. “They’re still a nice person and they shouldn’t be treated differently.”

Brianna Jones, an eighth-grader at Bernie Middle School in Southfield who was among the youths polled, said there were difficulties that fellow Arab students faced at her school in recent years. “After (September 11), there were a lot of problems with kids calling each other names,” said Jones, 13. “I think they moved or their parents had them sent to another school.”

At Novi Middle School, Nicole Bang said she doesn’t see students of color or from different ethnic backgrounds facing discrimination. But when asked about gay students, Bang, 13, insisted there weren’t any at her school. But if someone announced they were gay, Bang said, most people would probably think they were joking. “If he wasn’t joking, he likely would find himself friendless the next day,” Bang said. “Not many people want to be hanging out with a guy or girl who is gay.”

Some students report an anti-gay bias in schools statewide. For instance, Braden Jahr, a resident of Sebewaing, east of Bay City, recently reported that he was called names and attacked in the halls on a daily basis that eventually led to his dropping out in his first semester of high school. He later took a test to get his GED, or high school equivalency degree.

“They made me feel like I was not a person,” said Jahr, who now is in a more accepting environment at a local college. “The one thing I tell people is we’re just like everybody else. There is nothing majorly different about us except for who we love.”

The poll’s results do not surprise many advocates for gay students, who note that students a generation ago mostly stayed in the closet while in high school. “In this day and age, young people are coming out in high school and it’s a much more difficult environment,” said Grace McClelland, executive director of the Ruth Ellis Center in Detroit, an organization reaching out to homeless, runaway and at-risk gay youth.

There’s still a lot of hostility againsts gays that adults harbor, McClelland said, and that hostility is passed onto young people. “If we are not creating an environment that is tolerant and celebrates diversity,” she said, “then we’re creating a dangerous, unsafe environment for our youth.”