An Unwilling Posterchild

At some point or another, boredom or egotism leads students to type their names into the Google search engine. Typically, such a search turns up a body of fascinating information: high school swim-meet times, math tournament statistics and the like. However, Aidin E.W. Carey ’07 recently Google-d her name only to come across something quite a bit scarier.

A white supremacist, anti-Semitic web site called the “Vanguard News Network” (VNN) was referring to her as the prey of “Jew parasites.” According to the site, upon her entrance to Harvard last fall, Carey unknowingly became a victim of “higher Jewry and itz [sic] accompanying Jew indoctrination.”

On March 10, 2004, the Boston Globe ran an article on the increasing numbers of high school students who are educated at home. The article stated that although home schooling was once the domain of religious fundamentalists, today many moderate parents choose to educate their children at home through twelfth grade, and then send them to regular colleges. Carey’s family was featured in the article as part of the trend, and her mother, Maureen Carey, was described as a Quaker and a pacifist.

To the VNN, those are dirty words. The article caught the eye of a VNN reader identified only as “Arch.” He wrote to VNN’s editor, bemoaning Carey’s fate and using her and other liberal home-schooled students as a prime reason for why home schooling should be abolished. His argument was that the children of these families receive “no diversity training or social conditioning to the Jew’s [sic] world order” at home, and so when they go to college, just aren’t as racist or anti-Semitic as they would be if they hadn’t been educated at home. The editor agreed that parents like Carey’s “support multicultural garbage.”

“I don’t really know what to do about it,” Carey says. “It’s kind of a scary thought that people talk about you that way. It’d be awful no matter what, but it’s so weird to be represented as something that I’m the complete opposite of.”

Carey remains impressively calm—dealing with the issue with an attitude of bemusement, rather than hysteria. This attitude of tolerance is best, it seems, learned at home.