Student Identity- News Update

When I came home tonight, I got on CNN.com and began to catch up on the day's news. Interestingly enough, I ran across an article entitled "Beheaded Woman's Sister: I might have heard the deadly confrontation." At a first glance, this article does not provide anything about our class tonight, but as I read the article, it deals with exactly what we discussed with student identity and the importance of being confirmed.

The article deals with a Muslim couple who came to the US 25 years ago and the husband became a successful banker. When the wife became pregnant in 2004, the couple became worried about the negative American perception of Muslims. As the article reads:

"Speaking in December 2004, Hassan said his wife, then pregnant, was worried about that perception and "felt there should be an American Muslim media where her kids could grow up feeling really strong about their identity as an American Muslim."
Bridges TV began as a television network for Muslim-Americans, aimed at overcoming the negative stereotypes associated with the religion."There should be a Muslim media," Muzzammil Hassan told VOA, "so that Muslim children growing up in America grow up with the self-confidence and high self-esteem about their identity both as Americans and as Muslims."

This couple who is not from America needed their identities to be confirmed, even as adults, and expected the same for their children. The Hassans knew that their identities as American Muslims were not being confirmed in the media, nor in the school system, and decided that there needed to be something done. This is a real life example of what we talked about in class tonight, and the importance of a person's identity in relation to their culture and religion.