Working Mother

Less than a week after President Obama’s Cairo speech urging peace and tolerance in the Middle East, Wednesday’s murder of a Holocaust Memorial Museum guard in Washington is a chilling reminder of how active organized hate groups are at home. While our YouTube-Facebook-Twitter-texting-connected kids have unprecedented tools for finding common ground among cultures that have been at odds for millennia, the rantings of suspected shooter, white supremacist, and anti-Semite James W. von Brunn show how easily the Internet can be used to sow hatred. So how do we protect our children from such vitriol?

Our interfaith family is attuned to the slings and arrows of bigotry: insulting assumptions about Jews—my husband’s family fled pogroms in Eastern Europe for New York more than 100 years ago; narrow stereotypes about the South, where my family has had Christian roots for 390 years. Yet a surge in extremism brought on by the recession and the election of our first African-American President, documented in April by the Homeland Security Dept. and in February by the Southern Poverty Law Center, seems far removed from our peaceful and diverse New Jersey suburb. That is until acts of violence like the museum attack expose the wired worlds of hate that course through the Internet.

As the President seeks mutual understanding on the world stage, it’s up to us as parents to ensure our children practice tolerance at home. Communities like mine, where the local memorial to the 700 New Jersey residents who died on September 11 is a daily reminder of the destruction hatred can unleash, have many cultural crossroads: the girls’ track meet last month, where two runners, worried they’d be late for their Hebrew high school confirmation class, watched as a head-scarved young woman from an area school sprinted across the finish lines; an interfaith meeting of Christian, Jewish, and Muslim teens (“Mom, the Muslim girls and boys sat separately”) where the clergy did much of the talking.

On weekends, rotating congregations of Christians, Jews, and Hindus fill churches and synagogues strapped for cash that rent their space to other worshipers. The local Barnes & Noble looks like a U.N. library as kids of all colors, SAT prep books and Starbucks coffee at hand, fill every available seat and spill into the aisles. And the adjacent mall is a global bazaar of shoppers from all corners of the earth hunting for bargains or the latest trendy goods. But New Jersey is no stranger to bigotry: In 2008, it ranked first in the nation in reports of anti-Semitic incidents, according to the Anti-Defamation League. Although down from 2007, there were 238 incidents ranging from two assaults on Jews to vandalism and graffiti—much of it initiated by teens.

To cross the bridge from recognition to mutual understanding and cooperation, what can our communities do? Our schools have long-running anti-bullying programs. Our interfaith clergy association—featuring a well-known local imam, rabbis, priests, and ministers– holds annual Thanksgiving and Holocaust memorial services. Teaching Tolerance, a program of the Southern Poverty Law Center, has teaching materials and its 101 Tools for Tolerance for individuals, homes, schools, workplaces and communities. Among them are No. 26, bookmark equity and diversity Web sites on your home computer; No. 27, point out stereotypes and cultural misinformation depicted in movies, TV shows, computer games, and other media; No. 57, invite bilingual students to give morning greetings and announcements on the PA system in their home languages; and No. 60, ask schools not to schedule tests or school meetings on the major holidays of any religious group. Develop a school calendar that respects religious diversity.

Sadly, some of kids’ best ideas are inspired after the fact—when acts of hate have taken their toll. Earlier this month in San Clemente, Calif., high school sophomores launched a peer-to-peer safety and support group, Cool 2 Be Kind Club, to honor their friend Daniel Mendez, who committed suicide over “relentless” bullying .

Readers, what kinds of things are your schools and communities doing to promote tolerance—and to prevent the hatreds so easily exploited on the Internet?

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