Immigrant mom says teachers union 'profiled' her for urging school reopening
California mom who says she was asked to 'racially self-identify' by Los Angeles teachers union joins 'Fox News Primetime'
A Los Angeles mother and outspoken proponent of school reopenings claims to have been racially profiled by the local teachers union who asked her to share her ethnicity in an email.
Maryam Qudrat, the daughter of immigrants from Afghanistan, told "Fox News Primetime" Thursday that she recently received a bizarre email from a member of United Teachers Los Angeles who asked her to share how she racially identifies or "point me to a citation on your identity." The email came after Qudrat was quoted in the Los Angeles Times on two separate occasions speaking out against the state's ongoing school closures.
"I was honestly shocked to be targeted like that," Qudrat told host Lawrence Jones. "I myself have been a teacher with the Los Angeles Unified School District, and I‘ve been an educator in the public education system. I never expected to have 1,000 indices to prove my last name and figure out my first name, race and profiling me that way by my own fellow colleagues, my teachers," she said.
UTLA President Cecily Myart-Cruz said Monday that the state's plan to return to in-person learning is "propagating structural racism." She also claimed that minority communities are being "unfairly targeted by people who are not experiencing this disease in the same ways as students and families are in our communities." In a January Facebook post, Myart-Cruz accused "wealthy white [sic] and Middle Eastern parents" of stalking union members on social media.
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Qudrat accused Myart-Cruz of suggesting parents who support a swift return to classrooms are " being racist."
"I would like to challenge the UTLA to give those wealthy White and Middle Eastern parents a million-dollar challenge and see if they will put their money and their resources into the African-American and Latino communities to help those students come to school first and get everybody back in school together," she said.
Qudrat added that her background exposed her "first-hand [to] what it looks like to deprive a generation of education.
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"The Taliban would say, 'Well, we're just closing the schools right now because of a security crisis, because of public crisis,'" she said, "and now you have the UTLA hell-bent on keeping our schools closed.
Qudrat accused the union of inciting a "racial war" among parents on the issue.
"The kids are suffering, being abused, the learning loss is tremendous. The African-American and Latino kids are going to suffer earning potential for their incomes. The United States GDP is going to suffer in the long run and our competitiveness throughout the globe is going to take a hit because of this. We have to stand up to the UTLA. We cannot continue to follow with this racial war that they're setting up," she said.
Jones asked Qudrat whether she was surprised "that you come to the freest place in the world, and they are not acting like it right now?"
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"This is very familiar to me in terms of being able to reframe what is complete injustice as equity and equality," she said. " And so I see it very clearly for what it is, and that's why I'm unwilling to accept it."
UTLA did not respond to Fox News' earlier request for comment.
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