No Muslims

My six year-old son and I were relaxing yesterday evening, playing a game of Crazy Taxi 3 on the computer.  It’s a fun driving game with three “worlds” made to look like Los Angeles, New York City and Las Vegas.  The object is to pick up passengers in your cab and get them from point A to point B as quickly as possible and before the time runs out. This could involve driving on sidewalks, jumping over buildings, heading through the subways and other fun surprises. It’s certainly not a game designed for kids Av’s age, but we play it with the PG-rated dialogue turned completely off. And we’ve had discussions about the game and how it’s very different from real life driving (which does not entail passengers not wearing seatbelts and standing up and high-fiving each other should the car burst through Grand Central Terminal at 60 miles per hour). He also knows that in real life, car crashes are bad and are things we would most like to avoid.

As we were driving in a place called “Small Apple,” the game’s New York world, we had just dropped off a bunch of hockey players to a few different locations, including the television station, the Hard Rock Cafe and the Opera House. (I’m glad that hockey players are portrayed to enjoy opera. I just wonder if it was necessary to wear the padding and bring the stick.) Our cab empty, we drove around to look for some new passengers to pick up.

“I don’t think there are any Muslims here in Small Apple.”

*screech*

“I’m sorry, what did you say?”

He repeated himself. “I just don’t see any Muslims here in the city.”

Where had this come from?  Did he overhear a conversation at home about Muslims?  socKs and I had been discussing the recent incident in the news where an American family was booted off an AirTran flight for the unthinkable crime of appearing in traditional Muslim clothing and saying something about safety that wouldn’t have caused anyone to blink if I had said the same thing. The family was cleared of any wrongdoing but was denied re-entry to the flight or passage on another AirTran flight at that time. (AirTran later apologized and offered to reimburse these passengers for their passage on a different carrier.) Could Av have picked up on our conversations about this?

I decided to probe the subject a bit further. “How do you know that they’re Muslim? What do they look like?”

“You know… they’re … Muslims. They’re brown You’ve seen them…”

Wow.

Av is no stranger to the Muslim world. Many of the teachers at his pre-school were Muslim women from Sudan and Egypt. It was actually quite entertaining: Avi was the only Jewish kid in this nursery school environment which met in the basement of a church.  Almost nobody knew how to pronnounce his name right from the start — except for his Muslim teachers.  When it came time for Christmas, he wasn’t celebrating it, nor were they — but the rest of the kids in school were. The dietary standards we kept as family which ate only Kosher food was new for the school administrators, but many of the Muslim teachers were already familiar with these rules which are similar to Halal, the parallel custom in Islam.  (When we had to set further dietary retrictions during Passover, they were the ones who took care of things very well.)  Even the preliminary Hebrew Avi was learning had some words which were very similar to Arabic ones.

Add into the mix that we live in a pretty diverse community. It’s not uncommon to see observant Jews, Muslims and Sikhs walking around in their respective traditional clothing or watching their kids playing on the same playgrounds. We hear many different languages around — not just English.  It’s just weird that Av would make a sweeping generalization equating Muslims and skin color. I decided to make this a learning experience for him.

“Avi, you know that not all people with dark skin are Muslim, right? And not all Muslims have dark skin as well.  People who are Muslim have a different religion — just as we do as Jewish people.  Do you understand?”

And he looked at me as if I had four heads.

“I wasn’t talking about Muslims. I was talking about Muscle Men!”

And, sure enough — the overly-bronzed “muscle men” to whom he was referring were the body builders he enjoyed picking up in the cab in the “West Coast” game. The characters have unique schtick when they get out of the car; the “muscle men” would give a body-building pose and be on their way.  These characters didn’t appear in the “Small Apple.” Hence — no muscle men.

Now it makes perfect sense. The problem doesn’t have to do with learned assumptions based on stereotypes and prejudices in the world of a six year-old. The problem is my hearing.

I really should go and have that checked out…