“Consider the life of a teenager: You have parents, teachers, telling you what to do. You have movies, magazines, and TV telling you what to do. But you know what you have to do. Your job, your purpose, is to get accepted.”
So said Harry H., the nastily-nicknamed, wizened-beyond-his-years pirate radio jock in the 1990 Christian Slater flick Pump Up the Volume. He had trouble fitting in mainly because he was new to town and a little shy. Imagine if there had been a war on and he looked like the enemy.
Hetal Bhatt and Kurosh Dejgosha were in preschool when that movie came out. But swap the Internet for a pirate radio station and it’s not that far from their lives today as students at Ball-Chatham’s Glenwood High School. Though they’re like Slater’s character–not about to change their values–they still wouldn’t mind being a little less misunderstood.
Kurosh shows up for an interview wearing a Gap sweatshirt and jeans. Hetal is decked out in a shiny Adidas track suit and white bucket hat. If you look past their All-American duds, however, you notice that Kurosh has Persian facial features, and Hetal has the skin tone of an Indian. In these excited times, either could be mistaken for Middle Eastern.
Neither Hetal nor Kurosh has ever lived in the Middle East. Kurosh, whose parents are Iranian, was born in Canada. While he was still a baby, his family moved to Ohio. They relocated to Springfield just last fall. Hetal has lived here all his life. His parents are from India, but he is a native Springfieldian, and has attended Chatham schools since kindergarten.
In a school system that is 96 percent white, Hetal has been mistaken for almost every kind of minority. He has been called Mexican, black, and Arab. Or, rather, derogatory nicknames for those ethnic types.
“Fourth, fifth, sixth grade is where it kind of took off–they called me everything,” he says. “In junior high, it was more like, we’ll make fun of him because he’s an easy target–there’s more of us than there are of him.
“The past two years, though, I don’t know whether it’s just me being more personable or whether I’m just hanging with the right people or what,” Hetal says. “I’ve experienced only a fraction of it now as compared to before.”
Hetal is personable. He’s outgoing and energetic, with a slightly cynical sense of humor. Like Kurosh, he is intense, highly intelligent, and addicted to news. Kurosh–making an “A” in AP calculus as a junior–is quieter, soft-spoken, and edgy. He isn’t just the new kid; he’s the new kid in a town that puts a premium on tenure, and a school where some kids seem unaware of historical conflicts in the Middle East.
“I’m not even Iraqi. And like, Iraq and Iran–there’s no love lost between them,” Kurosh says, in polite understatement. “The intelligent kids realize you’re not a terrorist, you’re not going to blow anything up. But the day after Bush announced the war on Iraq, I was ambushed.”
Kurosh says he was minding his own business, eating lunch in the school commons, when a group of kids suddenly surrounded him. He estimates there might have been 20 in all. Hetal, who was sitting nearby at the time, estimates that only a few were there to harass; the rest were just hoping to see a fight. What they agree on is that these kids slammed Kurosh’s books to the floor, accused him of hating America, and called him racist names like “camel jockey” and “sand nigger.” When the school resource officer appeared, the crowd dispersed. The officer assumed the incident was over.
“I had to tell him that I wanted to speak to the principal about this,” Kurosh says. “I just got harassed because of my race, and obviously there’s something wrong there.”
He was taken to talk to assistant principal Diana Bandy, who tried to remind him that many students were concerned about the safety of friends or loved ones in the military. “I tried to make him aware of how emotional this was,” she says.
Kurosh perceived it differently. He felt that Bandy was telling him to keep quiet (a notion she denies). “The thing that kind of made me mad is that Ms. Bandy pretty much told me that I shouldn’t be vocal about my opinions or I’m going to get hurt,” Kurosh says.
The kids who harassed him got a speech from the principal, but no detentions or suspensions or other formal discipline.
“The thing is,” Kurosh says, “this happened during Safe School week.”
“Yeah, it did!” Hetal laughs wryly. “Funny stuff! Ha, ha, ha.”
“Wasn’t that the day you’re supposed to be like tolerant of other races or something like that?” Kurosh asks.
“I think that whole week you were supposed to be tolerant,” Hetal says. “But just that week. After that, everybody could go back to normal.”
The word Hetal chooses to describe what’s normal among kids at his high school is the gentlest synonym for a number of harsh words. “They’re sheltered. That’s the term I like to use,” he says.
“Like in our school, whenever class discussions occur, they’re not so much discussions as just reinforcement of popular beliefs. The kids all have the exact same beliefs . . . because the kids in our school, everybody’s white, OK? That’s what I’m trying to get at. Everybody’s white and comes from a conservative background. Our school is probably like 90 percent Republican. You get people like me and Kurosh who can present things from a different point of view, and we tend to catch a lot of heat. It’s not like people hate us for it, but they see us in a different light. We’re not going to get as much respect as if we were conservative white Christian people. I guess that’s natural.”
“The problem is, most people don’t think for themselves,” Kurosh says. “Their parents tell them, and they just accept it.”
Kurosh and Hetal say they each arrived at their own set of beliefs by testing their parents. Hetal says he grew up trusting the opinions of his schoolmates, thinking his father was “a little absurd.” But not now. “I hear him talk about how terrorism could be dropping bombs over a city, and I’m like, ‘Oh, he was actually right all this time.’ “
Kurosh describes his parents as conservative. “I used to be conservative too, up until middle school. Then I started exploring beliefs for myself. That’s why I believe so strongly in these things,” Kurosh says. “It’s not because my parents told me, my church told me, the President told me. I have formed these beliefs myself.”
Neither Kurosh nor Hetal plans to start a club, make a speech, or do anything to try to convert classmates to their point of view. They would like to just enjoy high school without arousing suspicion and fear–to “get accepted” on some basic level.
“I’m not saying you should re-vamp your beliefs,” Hetal says. “We see things from a different perspective because our background is different. I’m just saying don’t be afraid of beliefs that are different from yours. It never hurts to learn another point of view.”
This article appears in Apr 10-16, 2003.
