Breaking the Silence: The Cost of Misinformation and Delayed Response
“We need to understand what’s going on to bridge the disconnect between our community and the world around us.”
My hermit crab “Pickles” died on Friday, October 13th. On Saturday, October 14th, I found myself walking to the Petco on 2nd Avenue and 52nd Street when I witnessed a hate crime against a Jewish man outside a synagogue. A duo walking by threw what appeared to be an egg at the man in front of a police officer. The officer just watched as the man asked for help, and the duo ran away, and the man quickly looked to find safety in the synagogue, and…wait, wait, wait: how did we get here?
On Saturday, October 7th at 1:54 AM I received the following notification on my phone from the New York Times:
“Palestinian militants fired barrages of rockets from Gaza into southern and central Israel in a surprise attack.”
A few hours later, I received this notification:
“We are at war,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said after Palestinian militants launched surprise rocket and ground assaults in Israel.”
At the moment, there is a war in Israel between the terrorist organization Hamas and the Israeli government. Former CSH history teacher Ms. Kahan, whose family is Jewish, summarized the situation by saying the following:
This conflict in the Middle East is long and complicated, exacerbated by centuries of divisions, meddling by foreign powers, conflicts over land rights, and colonialism. Today's volatile situation, which has led to immense human suffering, is largely a product of that complex history.
People are being murdered and kidnapped, entire families are being wiped out, human rights are being violated, Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia have pervaded in the wake of this conflict, and still there are people in our CSH community who don’t know what is going on.
I first noticed the disconnect and general lack of awareness when I engaged in a conversation about the conflict with a group of students and our college counselor Mr. Meyers, who is also a member of the Jewish community. As we spoke, I realized that a lot of my peers weren’t aware about what was going on. They were uninformed, and I didn’t realize it prior to the conversation because I had never really given much thought to the fact that my peers may not have been following current events in the same way I was.
I let my realization guide me, and I interviewed 10 students across the CSH community from all four grades. Of the 10 students that I interviewed, only 3 were able to confidently tell me that they knew what was going on in Israel and Gaza. Let that sink in for a second.
3 out of 10
30%
But what’s the reason behind this disconnect? Behind this lack of understanding?
I’ve found there to be three:
The first was shared by CSH senior Adyel Lantigua who feels the disconnect is a result of many students not having “any stakes in the conflict,” so they’re less likely to give the issue the attention it deserves because it doesn’t personally affect them.
The second was shared by CSH sophomore Malayah Coleman who said she feels the disconnect is because she and many others “don’t pay attention to current news.”
The third was shared by CSH senior Fathima Ballee who feels the disconnect is a result of the war just not being a “great thing to hear.”
Every single person that I interviewed happened to rationalize their disconnect using one of these three reasons. However, while each person’s reasoning may have differed, they all agreed on one thing: CSH should be doing more to inform its community members about the conflict.
One thing that Lantigua expressed in our interview was his shock at the fact that the school “hasn’t addressed this issue like they usually do when something major happens,” which is a sentiment that many others also shared. In agreement with him was fellow CSH senior Arnel N. Asante, who shared that had his advisor Ms. Germaine not spoken about the issue with his advisory because she is Jewish, he would likely still be clueless about the situation.
Don’t we owe it to the members of our community to be informed? To actually give a damn about what deserves it instead of acting like nothing is wrong?
When asked if he felt the CSH community could be made more aware of what’s going on, Mr. Meyers told me that this could be true for “a lot of global, federal, and local issues.” A big issue he notices is this “broader trend of a lack of engagement” that often results in things like logical fallacies that can be harmful to various communities.
This same lack of awareness and engagement is also responsible for an increase in offensive social media posts by students. Mr. Meyers believes that these posts stem from a “lack of knowledge, education, and understanding,” and while many people are compassionate and don’t want to cause harm, “there’s a lot of lack of thought behind posts and the ramifications and consequences they can have.” This increase in offensive media is also accompanied by an increase in Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia. One thing that Ms. Kahan noticed was how “amongst people who are strongly pro or anti-Israel, that rhetoric has gotten very inflamed” (something that often occurs in periods of high conflict).
However, it’s important to note that when students post on social media about political and social issues, they are simply exercising their right to protected speech. CSH Executive Director, David Noah, understands that while “they are entitled to express themselves” due to protected speech, “people post on social media about things they often know very little about.”
Another big thing to consider with social media is how social media algorithms impact the type of news that we receive and also contribute to the misinformation or lack of awareness of the public. Mr. Noah’s belief is that “the advent of social media has created a fracturing of the media marketplace” where “people get news through social media that is targeted to them.” So, what may be all over your social media may not be all over someone else's. That’s just not how the algorithm works.
So what exactly can CSH do, especially when a student’s lack of awareness of an issue might lead them to cause harm to someone else online? What responsibility do they have to inform the community and also acknowledge those in the community impacted by the conflict?
When asked this, students emphasized to me that, if the school made informational slides, had a community meeting, or had staff who identified as Jewish lead lessons, they would know more. The fact of the matter is that a majority of students are willing to learn and understand the conflict and its impact, but they just haven’t been given the resources, support, or opportunity to. And those who have some understanding also haven’t been given the opportunity to hold space for themselves after seeing disturbing images and content coming out of Gaza and Israel. However, it is important to acknowledge that at least some responsibility also falls on students because they have to choose to learn and follow the news. As Ms. Kahan said, “People have to read the news but they also have to make a conscious effort to broaden their perspectives beyond their own ideological bubble.”
I had the opportunity to speak with CSH History Department Chair Ms. Aluko — who is also involved in the planning and delivery of community-wide framing around current events — and was able to ask her about the difficulties of planning these sensitive conversations and what must be considered before they are held. She told me that two of the things that she considers when planning are:
1. The diversity of perspectives that exist across the community — Students and teachers can be passionate, unaware and willing to learn, or unaware and just not care at all.
2. The level of comfort teachers need to have before they have these conversations with students — If the adults who are facilitating these conversations haven’t had the space to process the topic then we can’t expect students to.
Her belief (which Mr. Noah also shared) is that “it’s worse to have a bad conversation instead of no conversation.” Preparing facilitators for any possible outcome and also deciding where these conversations should take place (advisory, community meetings, and more) are all things that the school has to do to ensure the conversations are productive and that students feel centered. In her words, the one thing she tells facilitators to remember is that they “are the workers at Disney World — it’s not [their] time at Disney World.”
In my conversation with Mr. Noah, he also expressed that the school wants students to have enough context to do two things:
1. Draw their own conclusions
2. Understand how others can come to different conclusions even with the same facts
However, he also acknowledged that the only way for this to be possible is to have people well versed in the history and geopolitics of the Middle East to lead these conversations. To him “it’s not as if every staff member could just be given some slides and break down the entire history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.” It’s a highly sensitive and complicated topic, and so it has to be treated as such.
There is also something to be said about the fact that CSH is a majority-minority community composed mostly of Black and Hispanic students. And yet, even with the identity and culture the school most directly serves, it still fails to do enough to address things like the senseless killing of Black people when it occurs on a smaller scale. The last time that CSH senior Evelyn Kedelina recalls the school actually addressing the death of a Black person at the hands of police, was in 2021 during the peak of the BLM movement and following the death of George Floyd. If we really do care about the community, then shouldn’t we also give our attention to those without prominence who are impacted? Have we even considered what the costs could be if we don't?
Even from an intersectional lens, when we think of identity, we often think of it one-dimensionally. We fail to consider the fact that instead of just being Black or just being Jewish, those identities can intersect in a way where one can actually stand in solidarity with both. Members of the Black Congressional Caucus like Ilhan Omar and Ritchie Torres, have in the past publicly expressed solidarity with either the Israeli people or the Palestinian people, and yet we would never know that because this intersection is something that isn’t discussed in our community. In her book “Freedom is a Constant Struggle,” Angela Davis said, “whenever you conceptualize social justice struggles, you will always defeat your own purposes if you cannot imagine the people around whom you are struggling as equal partners.” Instead of treating identity as something without overlap, perhaps we should find ways to make people connect that bring together separate identities instead of keeping them apart as a way of building strength and solidarity.
It’s clear that the school tries to take a very methodical and thought out approach when addressing major issues, and they have considered and also been thinking about ways to address the current conflict in Israel, but where’s the urgency?
The time it takes us to respond to things matters.
It’s been over two weeks since Hamas’s attack on Israel, and still, there has been no public initiative taken to address it in our community or provide space to those impacted. Teachers who have lost loved ones or who are impacted by the war emotionally and mentally have had to push on and simply continue as if nothing is wrong. Even Mr. Noah (who is one of the people who decides what we address or don’t address as a community) expressed to me how he feels “caught between who he has to be in his job and who he has to be in his life.” The plain truth is we aren’t giving those affected the space and time to process on their own, and instead we’re pushing them to continue as if nothing is wrong.
Why not tell people that something is in the works behind the scenes? Why not say something like “we hear you and we are working” in a public statement? Why leave teachers and students guessing and wondering why the school has chosen not to address issues close to them? Silence keeps people guessing. Every issue matters and so do the people impacted by them, so we need to start showing that and acting like it.
If we can educate ourselves and those around us why wouldn’t we? Why wouldn’t we use education to shut down hatred, Anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, and other senseless acts that occur daily in our communities? Why would we just leave people uninformed, in the dark, and brush key conflicts like this under the rug to the side?
The answer is that we can use education to our advantage and inform people, but we put off doing so or just chose not to altogether because we’re scared.
One worry that Ms. Kahan expressed in our interview was that immediately choosing a side rather than deepening one's understanding of the conflict and offering a sense of compassion for the suffering occuring allows for both Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia to spread. The sad truth is that her worries are already emanating throughout our communities.
Prior to Saturday, October 14th, I had never witnessed a hate crime with my own eyes. Of course I’d read and seen videos on the news of them occurring, but I had never been placed into the situation myself. The war may be going on in the Middle East, but if you take a good look around you’ll find hate crimes, protests, and a mass amount of an overall lack of empathy and understanding. And in reality, these smaller acts of aggression (that still have a major impact) are the reason why such horrific global events occur. Mr. Meyers didn’t realize until last week how such an absolutely tragic and horrific event like the Holocaust could have happened with so many people watching, but he expressed to me that now he does because of the acts of aggression in both our community and the Middle East.
When we fail to think; when we choose to be ignorant; when we choose to not address issues that need to be addressed, we open up the doors for evil and hatred to work their way into our lives. And what I find the most terrifying about this is that by choosing not to address issues or waiting so long to address them that they become even more harmful, we normalize them. We normalize things that should not be normal and then when they have adverse effects on us we are quick to say “we didn’t know” or “we couldn’t do anything about it.” But we could have and we should have.
The plain truth is that nobody deserves to be discriminated against because of their ethnic, religious, or cultural identity; nobody deserves to live in fear or have to be hypervigilant because they could possibly be the victim of a hate crime; nobody deserves the pain and suffering that ignorance and unawareness cause.
At the end of the day, we’re all human, but we need to act like it. We need to have a universal understanding about current events and that the lives of others matter just as much as ours because if we don’t, we are choosing to stand by and let people suffer and live in fear.
We need to understand what’s going on to bridge the disconnect between our community and the world around us.
It falls on us.
I implore you to please give a damn about what deserves it.