People who believe America is a post-racial, colorblind haven where #AllLivesMatter need to wake up from their fantasy and face reality.
Ahmed Mohamed is a 14-year-old student from Irving, Texas who made a clock to show to his teacher. School is a place of learning and innovation, and any 14-year-old who can engineer a functioning clock has potential to improve society. His teacher should have been proud of him.
And she probably would have been proud if he was a white student named Cody Sibley, but instead Mohamed is Muslim. Because he’s Muslim, everything he makes is a bomb, and he automatically wants to kill all Americans, at least that’s what some people think.
In addition to his religion, Mohamed is the son of immigrants from Sudan. He’s a black Muslim son of immigrants who lives in Texas. You can’t possibly believe those demographics didn’t have an impact in this situation.
The police argued they would have done the same had it been a white student, and had to consider the safety of others in the school.
The cops almost made a valid point. Too bad they didn’t actually do anything about the “threat.” No one evacuated the school. The administration didn’t call the bomb squad. Did they call the school board or the superintendent of schools? No, it didn’t.
The school’s administration is either ill-prepared for imminent threats or doesn’t care about the safety of its students, staff and faculty and just wanted to make an example of a small Muslim teenager. In either case, Irving’s school board needs — at the very least — to reprimand the administration and teacher who called the police.
The police questioned him and, lo and behold, the clock was actually a clock.
“We attempted to question the juvenile about what it was, and he would simply only tell us that it was a clock,” Officer James McLellan, Irving police spokesperson, said.
The police said Ahmed should have elaborated more than, “It was a clock.” What more do you want him to say? Should he have taken apart the clock? Should he have gone into a full description of how he made the clock? It would have gone over their heads anyway. They can’t tell the difference between a circuit board and a clock, so it’s safe to assume they couldn’t handle any description beyond, “It’s just a clock.”
It’s not a coincidence that Irving’s mayor, Beth Van Duyne, is an Islamophobic fear-mongerer. In February, she vowed to investigate a “Shariah law court” rumored to open by Irving’s mosque. She thought it might violate basic human rights.
The court she mentioned was designed to settle civil disputes between Muslims for a fee. It wasn’t tied to any mosques, and it wasn’t even in Irving — the “Shariah law court” opened in Dallas. Duyne used her platform to perpetuate Islamophobia.
That’s interesting. I wonder if she looked into her local Catholic churches to make sure their marriage counselors didn’t violate women’s rights, or maybe she looked into Evangelical Christian churches to make sure they didn’t violate gay people’s civil rights.
She’s defending the school and police’s decision for arresting and suspending Mohamed.
“To the best of my knowledge, they followed protocol for investigating whether this was an attempt to bring a Hoax Bomb to a school campus,” Duyne wrote on her Facebook page.
She’s placing institutional racism as more important than a child’s education. How classy.
It would be nice if we lived in a post-racial utopia where skin color wasn’t a factor in situations, but we don’t. Law enforcers and those in power treat some groups of people more fairly than others, and it’s no coincidence those people treated fairly are white.
Cody Sibley is a 19-year-old mass communication sophomore from Opelousas, Louisiana. You can reach him on Twitter @CodySibley.