`Prank' gets teen lesson in tolerance
Displacing a Muslim woman's scarf leads to sensitivity training
David Huffman told police it was just a prank gone wrong: On April 22, at a McDonald's in Tinley Park, he tapped a Muslim woman on the head, nearly pulling off her headscarf.
The woman, a young mother with her children, didn't see it as harmless. She was scared and embarrassed; her faith had been attacked. She told police, and they called it battery.
But in a surprising twist, a Cook County circuit judge did not fine or jail Huffman, who pleaded guilty. He was instead ordered to undergo sensitivity training at the downtown Chicago office of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the nation's largest Muslim civil rights organization.
During the past three months, Huffman, 18, has spent 40 hours listening to and talking with Muslims across Chicagoland. He has completed required tasks that seemed ripped from reality television: watching Muslim youths play basketball, attending a 9/11 event and visiting area mosques, which Huffman called "synagogues" at the beginning of his training.
But what exactly did David Huffman learn?
Day 1
When Huffman first arrived Aug. 4 at the Muslim civil rights organization's office, his hands were shaking from nervousness, and he appeared as though he'd rather have been anywhere else. He was late, for starters. He arrived with his shoes untied and a patchy stubble, looking more like he had just stumbled out of bed than spent the better part of an hour commuting from Tinley Park.
"I'd rather not talk about it," Huffman said of the April incident, soon after arriving. "I want to forget it."
He eventually told his version of the events. He said he knew he was wrong, but he was confused why the woman had become so upset.
"I understood immediately after I did it. But even after I apologized, she was still so angry," he said. "I didn't understand that."
Explaining that to him would be the responsibility of Veronica Zapata, the organization's sensitivity training coordinator. That day, she led Huffman around the corner to the Downtown Islamic Center on South State Street, where she showed him the empty mosque.
"Religion is a waste of time," Huffman said without apparent malice, as his fingers traced ceramic tiles that spell out the 99 names of God in Islam. He checked his mobile phone text messages with his other hand.
Zapata, 32, a Mexican-American Muslim convert, winced at the comment, but she later said she was optimistic about the next several weeks.
"I don't know how reflective he's going to be. I feel the resistance," she said. "I think he has good potential."
`I got in trouble'
Huffman's April arrest came less than two months before he was to graduate from Tinley Park's Andrew High School, where he struggled to stay out of trouble, he said.
"I'm a legend in my high school," he said with a self-conscious swagger.
Still, his brushes with authority have not soured him on applying to a police force when he graduates from community college. It's a calling Huffman said he feels because he wants to help people and because he's a good communicator.
Those communication skills were initially absent as he spent a Friday evening with numerous youths at the Muslim Youth Center in Bridgeview. Huffman was timid around the teens, which could have come from the fact that three young men asked why he was there soon after his arrival, and they left little doubt that they already knew the answer.
"I got in trouble with some Muslims," Huffman said, as the teenagers waited for a longer answer. "I tapped a woman on the head, and they gave me 40 hours."
Conversation turned to sports and video games until everyone broke for evening prayers.
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I think that I would have rather taken the jail time.
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