Dear School Principals,

Parents tend to get excited about the start of a new school year. We’re ready for our kids to be back in the swing of learning. But there’s an issue we need to talk about before the school year begins.

We know principals are juggling lots of moving parts, academic and administrative, before the hallways get filled with children. Teachers are working on learning new ways to help their students achieve higher goals. School staff may be planning ways to deal with the traumas students bring with them and looking for additional resources to better serve them. And that’s not to mention the hiring, budgeting and scheduling that come together at the last minute.

We know that among your top priorities is to keep the young people in your charge safe -- physically, emotionally and socially. Many of us say a prayer when we send our children into those buildings. Every mass shooting brings another wave of fear.

This year, we have another urgent plea: Please pay attention to the world outside the school building and think about how it’s going to impact the students you serve. You know as well as we do that bullying related to race and ethnicity has increased since the last presidential election. Students have parroted hateful language as taunts on playgrounds, and racial slurs have shown up in students’ social media feeds. Studies are starting to bear out the stories from families who have experienced this fallout firsthand.

Researchers studied the rate of bullying in middle schools in Virginia and found that in 2017 teasing and bullying were significantly higher in schools located in districts that had voted for Donald Trump compared with districts that had voted for Hillary Clinton. This difference in the rate of bullying based on districts’ voting patterns didn’t exist before the last election. This upcoming election season is shaping up to be even worse.

Some of your students will bear the brunt of this politicized rhetoric.

Your students of color walk into their classrooms knowing that a white supremacist just massacred 22 people in El Paso. When one of their classmates uses the “n-word,” or draws a swastika on a bathroom stall or says “go back to where you came from,” think for a moment how that might feel against this backdrop.

In addition to insulting, it may feel threatening. Unsafe.

We know privacy laws prevent you from discussing consequences when students are disciplined, but have you thought of ways to address the incidents that hurt a community without singling out a specific child? When principals refuse to name or discuss these problems it feels like they are being swept aside, that the safety of some kids isn’t really a priority. When principals refuse to act by saying an incident happened “outside of school hours,” it sounds like a cop-out.

You are responsible for setting the tone of the school’s culture, and most schools teach values like respect and responsibility. When those values are tested this year, we want to hear you clearly say: This is hateful and racist. This is hurtful. This is not who we want to be.

How will you use these moments to teach the aggressor empathy and help him or her understand why these words and actions are destructive? If their parents push back, will you have the courage to stand up for what you know is right?

I believe most educators get into this profession because they care deeply about students. And in this time of deep division and rising acts of bigotry, we need to hear louder voices from the principals who lead our nation’s schools.

It takes courage to admit that adults may also say things they shouldn’t. It takes heart to recognize the hurt when a student or parent shares such an incident. The way you respond will reverberate throughout the school. Others will take their cue from you.

Teachers will watch how you respond. Students who want to be allies for their friends will watch how you respond. Parents will watch how you respond.

We are trusting you to know that racist harassment hurts more than the person targeted. It hurts the entire community.

Every student should know their principal has their back.

We are counting on your courage.

The divide between how Gen X parents grew up and how our children are growing up was already a wide chasm before the political world turned upside down.

Compare our coveted technology (a Walkman) to theirs (an iPhone), or our parents’ parenting style (benign neglect) to ours (hovering helicopter). Our ways of communicating and operating in the world are fundamentally different than theirs.

But the past few years have upended norms in a way our generation had never experienced before: Overnight, we went from electing the first black president to one whose rallies feature racist chants. Do our children grasp how strange things are right now, or is this their version of normal? What’s the best way to explain to them how far we’ve drifted from political and social norms without unduly terrifying them?

I asked one of the most prominent political voices on the internet, who frequently warns about the dangers of normalizing an acutely abnormal moment in our history. Sarah Kendzior is a progressive writer and scholar on authoritarian regimes, a frequent MSNBC commentator, bestselling author, co-host of the “Gaslit Nation” podcast, and has nearly half a million followers on Twitter. She’s also a St. Louis-based mom with two young children, 12 and 8 years old, who have heard her discuss difficult current events on TV and at home.

“I’ve flat-out told them, ‘This is not normal. This is not how the government is supposed to work,’” she said. “We’re in a turning point in American history.”

It’s not normal for the president to be retweeting white supremacists or tweeting racists taunts. It’s not normal to have a president who has lied more than 10,000 times in office, many times about things people easily can see and hear simply aren’t true. It’s not normal for an American president to dismiss a foreign threat to American democracy, and, in fact, openly encourage that foreign interference in an election.

None of us have ever seen a president behave like this before. And it’s unsettling to the majority of Americans who don’t support this to understand how others can go along with it.

It’s tempting for parents to simply want to seek refuge for their family life from the storms swirling outside. But Kendzior says that for many kids, especially those targeted by this administration, that’s not an option. Like most parents, she wants her children to appreciate the gravity of what’s happening, while maintaining a sense of security and hope.

Kendzior makes a point to teach them about American history by visiting museums and historical sites, so they can recognize patterns and see how the past impacts the present. She talks to them about how to stand up for others who might be getting picked on or suffering, and why that is the right thing to do.

She believes it’s important to validate children’s feelings and to reassure them that many people are working to make things better.

“Always tell your kid that you’ve got their back and that there are millions of other people who are fighting for them,” she said, adding that it’s normal to feel angry when children recognize things are unfair. “It’s a horrible thing happening,” she said. “We should be mad.”

There was an exchange during the televised hearing with former special counsel Robert Mueller that speaks to the fear that some things in our political system may have become permanently broken. Rep. Peter Welch, a Democrat from Vermont, asked Mueller: “Have we established a new normal from this past campaign that is going to apply to future campaigns, so that if any one of us running for the U.S. House -- any candidate for the U.S. Senate, any candidate for the presidency of the United States -- is aware that a hostile foreign power is trying to influence an election, has no duty to report that to the FBI or other authorities?”

“I hope this is not the new normal,” Mueller responded. “But I fear it is.”

It’s a collective fear. What if pathological lying, racist bullying and open defiance of laws are what our children come to see as “politics as usual”?

To them, our message can be this simple: Yes, things are totally out of whack, but lots of us are trying to fix it.

We believe you can help.

A few years ago I went back to visit Pakistan, the country my parents left to emigrate to America.

I still have relatives there. I can understand the language. The food is delicious. The art is stunning, and the people have legendary hospitality. It’s also been on the brink of a failed state politically, with all the challenges and corruption that developing nations face.

It’s an odd experience when you’ve grown up a minority in your own country to suddenly be in a place where you are in the majority. I was particularly aware of my status as part of the privileged majority when I visited with the religious minority communities there. Members of the Ahmadiyya community face state-sponsored discrimination, and some Christians also have been targets of persecution and targeted violence. Political leaders and journalists who have spoken out in defense of religious minorities risk violence and threats. For years, rising intolerance has been fueled by those with a political agenda.

Hatred and fear of “the other” can be powerful recruiting tools anywhere in the world. My own children have never been to Pakistan, and I wonder how different their experience might be. For me, there’s always a sense of relief when I come back home from traveling abroad. I’m hyperaware of my “Americanness” when I am in a different country -- my beliefs, my mannerisms, my way of operating in the world are a clear giveaway.

After this most recent trip to Pakistan, questions nagged at me when I returned. What if my parents had stayed and I had been raised in an educated, Sunni Muslim family where the country’s power structure and dominant culture benefited my group. Would I have grown up to care about the most vulnerable people in that society? Would I have spoken out if they were demonized if it didn’t affect me personally? Would I have made excuses for or rationalized the dehumanization I can see so clearly as an outsider? Would I have looked away from it all, oblivious to an injustice because I wasn’t personally involved?

Maybe I wouldn’t have wanted to rock the boat or offend my family or friends who supported a particular political party. Maybe I would have thought there were more pressing concerns and been willing to compromise on the backs of the most vulnerable.

These were uncomfortable questions to consider. I wouldn’t want to be that person. I like to believe I’m a person who cares about liberty and justice for everyone, not just when my own liberties are threatened. But, maybe as part of the majority, I wouldn’t have been aware of what it actually feels like to live under a sense of political threat and otherness.

Maybe it would have been easier to stay silent, even if I saw places of worship bombed or angry mobs targeting innocent people who were different from me.

I think about this when I notice the deafening silence of Americans who I know to be good and decent people. We all know what it means when people chant “Send her back!” at a political rally. We know what it means when only certain Americans are ever told to “go back” somewhere other than the country in which they are a citizen.

In Pakistan, I could have been part of a silent majority willing to overlook cruelty and bigotry. It wasn’t just greater economic opportunities and democratic freedoms I benefited from by being born in America. Growing up as a minority in America changed my heart and conscience. I internalized the belief that we are a country bound by common ideals -- not a particular race, ethnicity or religion -- and the sense of responsibility that comes with defending those values. This is the idea of America I’ve instilled in my children. 

Growing up hearing slurs shouted at my mother has given me the courage to call out a wrong when I see it happening. Learning our history has made me realize that if a politician promised me safety and economic security at the expense of Christians or Jews or Hindus, I would reject it.

It’s America that taught me if a political leader says we would be greater if we got rid of those who disagreed with him, he is betraying our most cherished values.

It’s America that taught me the price of silence is greater than any risk of speaking out.

It’s America that tells me it is my only home.