Most of her best friends are black. But that wasn’t how it was a few years ago, when she came to Lincoln from a school and a place where there were no blacks.

You wouldn’t have wanted to be her friend then if you were black. You probably would have looked at her on the playground like she was stupid and known nothing about what she’d been through.

If you were best friends with her now, before gym class you two would hurry up and change out of the hiphop-style clothes you stole from each other’s closets so you could practice your moves in the locker room.

You’d know she likes to make up her own routines or do her “Honey moves” — dancing like you’re dribbling a basketball and then shooting, doing that arm thing like you’re rolling dice, the body rolls and backward hops.

You’d know “Honey” is a movie that stars Jessica Alba and rappers Lil’ Romeo and Missy Elliott. It’s about a hiphop dancer named Honey who follows her dream to open a dance studio for ghetto kids.

You’d play the “Honey” movie CD over and over, going each time to “Special Features” on the menu to learn the moves from the real “Honey” choreographer.

If you were best friends with her, you’d probably be helping her plan it right now, making posters to hang in the basement rec room and talking about how cool it’ll be.

You’d think she was so pretty, maybe tell her she looks like Alicia Keys with her tight braids and big brown eyes and skin like hot chocolate with lots of milk.

There were many black kids at Elliott Elementary. There were none in her school in Iran, where she would go in a long blue dress and white veil that covered everything but her face and hands.

Her family belongs to the Baha’i religious faith. Only 2 percent of Iranians are Baha’i. The government of Iran is a theocracy, run by conservative Muslims, and Baha’I followers are not Muslim.

Men in uniforms would knock on the front door, any hour of the day, and take away things related to the Baha’i faith and anything else they wanted, even home videos and photo albums of her and her baby sister on their birthdays and first days of school.

Derek looks like the rapper Ludacris, Ghazal thinks. He’s come to Lefler this quarter to teach “Hip Hop 101,” an after-school program sponsored by the YMCA .

You have to hear the message in hiphop music, he tells Ghazal and the other kids. It’s street poetry. Some messages are good. Some are bad – the gangsta stuff about sex and thugging and money.

One day, he told the kids in the class that they’d be dancing at a hiphop showcase at the local university soon, and they needed to come up with a tight routine.

A few classes later, Derek told the class there would be a talent show at the end of the quarter and they needed to come up with a skit about what they learned in Hip Hop 101, and a real dance.

If you were Ghazal’s best friend, you might be at her home, a split-level with green shutters in south Lincoln, sitting legs crossed with her on her bedroom’s pink carpet.

You might be listening to hiphop songs on Ghazal’s CD player, and watching her flip through page after page of the singers she loves, ripped from teen magazines.

“Here’s Ciara. And Omarion. And Ashanti – she’s a role model, too. And I love Beyonce so much, too. That’s my biggest dream, to be famous like them someday. But I don’t know how these people become famous like this.

That’s when she started to get it. That black people were just people, full of goodness like Honey and the other the main characters. That people of every color could get along.

That black people could look all tough, like Missy Elliott in the film, but also be sweet and that maybe she shouldn’t judge black people so much.

If you were Ghazal’s friend, you would know that what happened the next day on the Elliott playground changed everything in her world, too.

In fourth grade, she was mainstreamed from special English classes into the regular classroom. She had to sit at a table right next to a black girl. Ghazal shot her a dirty look – one of those stay-away-from-me looks.

At recess at Elliott, the boys usually would play basketball while the girls would play music on a little CD player and dance. Mostly just the booty pop.

One night halfway through fourth grade, she saw a DVD of “Honey.” For hours, she practiced the Honey moves over and over. She added some of her own.

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