Zareen Kamal is an AFSC co-trainer for Communities Against Islamophobia and part of the StopCVE Chicago coalition in Chicago. She is a former Head Start teacher with a Master’s in Early Childhood Education.

When I was a preschool teacher at a community-based center last year, we began serving a growing number of refugee and immigrant children and families, some of whom were Muslim. As the only Muslim teacher there, I noticed how other adults at the school made assumptions about cultural differences in a genuine attempt to understand why some students behaved the way they did: “In their culture, they aren’t allowed to...”