When I was younger, I wanted to be American. I wanted to live in a house in a suburban neighborhood, and have a golden retriever named Sparky. Even though as a child, I worshipped Hannah Montana, watched every High School Musical DVD, and sang along with every other eight-year-old to Radio Disney, I was still different. My dad is from Togo, a country in West Africa. He immigrated to this country over 20 years ago, and speaks three languages: French, Ewe, and English.

Whenever my family is in a public place and my dad talks to his relatives on the phone in Ewe, strange looks are thrown at us, he has to deal with rude people who can’t understand his accent, and ignorant statements about Africa. What my dad encounters on a daily basis is called xenophobia: a fear or hatred of strangers or foreigners*. Xenophobia is scary. It’s scary because it shows an outward reflection of our inner selves, how we fear anything that is not “normal” or traditional. And when our minds start to shut out anything new, we become more ignorant and we become less likely to integrate ourselves, leading to segregation of races, ideas and identities.

I cannot tell you how many times I have avoided my last name being said on the intercom at school, and how many times people have messed up my last name in front of a large group of people, and the snickers from ignorant people have bombarded my ears. All these things have made me insecure about my identity and sense of self. In turn, I have felt displaced from my peers and felt like a foreigner, even though by definition, I am American.

Since xenophobia is so detrimental to our society, we cannot let it keep happening in today’s world. In order to become comfortable with my African heritage, I have done research and my dad and I have been able to have discussions about it. This same thing can be done in our classrooms today if we are serious about fighting xenophobia. Elementary schools should start implementing international perspectives into their curriculum, starting in kindergarten. For example, my mom was substituting for a class in an elementary school, and she put my dad on the phone so her students could talk to him and learn some French expressions, which they enjoyed a lot. If we did things like this in small ways, like having foreign guests come in once a while, we can get children used to the idea that there are people who are different from us, but they are still human, and there is no reason to not accept them. This will encourage them to not only accept foreigners, but people in general who society considers to be “not normal”, and create future generations of more tolerating citizens. Change is not easy, but if we're willing to  have discussions about this, people like me that have foreign parents will finally be able to be American.

*from Merriam Webster
Citation: Gove, Philip Babcock. "Xenophobia." Merriam Webster. Merriam Webster, n.d. Web.