It didn't take long from the time the planes hit the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001 for something ugly to begin occurring in American classrooms. Arab American students, until then perceived as no different from anyone else, were suddenly very different. Classmates regarded them with suspicion, and sometimes outright hostility.
Writing in the Alhambra Source, contributor Nasrin Aboulhosn recalls the shape the bullying took in the aftermath of the attacks. A boy at her high school asked her why her father, a law-abiding Lebanese immigrant, "hijacked a plane and flew it into the Twin Towers." She learned recently that her younger sister had it worse. Aboulhosn writes: