Deceit Wrapped In Kindness

Islamophobia is real in small town Nebraska.

On Monday, August 19th, 2019 I drove 343 miles for five hours to the small town of Mullen, located in the beautiful Sandhills of Nebraska, where there is one of the top golf courses in the entire world. The drive was peaceful and I was looking forward to speaking to the students and staff there. Two staff members from Mullen had seen me speak in March when I was the keynote speaker at a conference sponsored by the Nebraska Association of School Boards at Grand Island, Nebraska. They felt that my presentation about The Secret Kindness Agents was needed in their town. However, I was a little uneasy about this trip because I had seen two news stories about bigotry in this part of the state just that week. A racist sign in Ord, Nebraska read “Make America White Again” and a Custer County Supervisor said immigrants are not welcome here in Nebraska, including Muslims, whom he described as “them people with them towels over their head”, a reference to Somali refugees. As a brown Muslim immigrant, I didn’t exactly feel welcome in this part of the state.

I arrived in Mullen at 2:00 pm and called the school to let them know I had arrived. They asked me to arrive a little early at the school because the superintendent had a few questions about my presentation to staff that afternoon. The superintendent told me that he had advertised me coming in case community members wanted to come. He then said that a couple of people had googled me and that it’s a conservative community, and so I should leave out any…