Discrimination In To Stay By Sara Bijan

Everyone has the right to be treated fairly, whether it has to do with race, gender, age, religion, or sexual orientation of a person. Many people are unfairly mistreated by awful individuals, and assumptions are made. One may think that because an individual did or said something wrong, the whole situation will turn out to be abhorrent. This may be true in some cases, but maybe a bad situation can have an unexpected outcome. In Here To Stay, by Sara Farizan, one follows the story of Bijan, a typical teenage middle eastern boy who does phenomenal in school, is talented on the basketball court, and has typical friends at Granger High School. After making the varsity basketball team an act of jealousy is performed by one of his teammates, Will,

From the beginning to the end, it is seen how Bijan becomes a stronger, and self-assured person. At the beginning of Bijan's story, he was not too big on talking about his ethnicity or heritage. When questioned about the email, he would put the topic off to the side to draw less attention to himself. When people would attack him because of what he looked like, Bijan would tend to avoid anything he could about his religion or ethnicity. At one point, Bijan experienced his breaking point where he just broke down and started to cry in front of his best friend, Sean. This now goes on to show that you need to be broken in order to be fixed. Bijan decided he would put an end to his discrimination from the email many weeks after it was sent, and he does this by standing up in front of his whole entire school to give a speech about himself. In Here To Stay on page 245, Bijan says to his school, “To the person who sent that email of me,” I said, “I’m not going to cower or allow ignorance to run my life. I’m going to be me, whether you like it or not.(Farizan). Before Bijans discrimination, he would have never have thought that he would talk about himself in such ways, especially in front of his peers who he has known for years. This goes to show how much of a stronger person his discrimination made him, by telling everyone that their differences still make them all