Ahmed Mohamed

So today a fourteen year old freshman was detained by police and suspended from school for three days because he brought a homemade digital clock to school in an attempt to impress his teachers with his engineering skills.

His name: Ahmed Mohamed
The place: Irving Texas, previously nationally known for it's pretty obvious anti-Islam ordnance passed earlier this year.

You may have guessed by the name that Ahmed is a Muslim, from a family that recently immigrated from Sudan. He apparently likes tinkering with stuff and assumed it would impress his teachers to come to school with a homemade clock, the teacher and principal of the school on the other hand decided that it looked enough like a bomb, and he was close enough to a foreigner, that they should call the police. The police decided that it looked enough like "a device" that five officers had to interview him and bring him to juvenile detention before accusing him of making "a hoax bomb" basically a dummy device that looks like a bomb for the purposes of scaring people, this despite the fact that Ahmed never referred to it as a bomb, never showed it to anyone except his engineering teacher, and, when it beeped during class, his English teacher. (The one who brought the principal in to this)

Bomb threats in school are serious business sure, and being careful is fine, but this kid never threatened anyone, and even showed it to another teacher, who did suggest that he not show it to anyone else, probably for fear of this exact scenario, but it means there was someone in the school who could say with authority that it was not a bomb and not intended for anything other than showing off a project. This was pretty confusing to the police, James McLellan, who is apparently paid actual money by the police department to talk to the press, had this to say "It could reasonably be mistaken as a device if left in a bathroom or under a car. The concern was, what was this thing built for? Do we take him into custody?"
The answers for any white kid who brought such a thing in would be: It was built to show off in class, and no, we don't take him in, because we aren't fucking idiots, why did you call us?

But of course safety wasn't the concern today, Ahmed has brown skin and a foreign name, and thus any hint of threat must be reacted to as forcefully as possible, I suppose we are lucky the guy didn't get shot for the crime of having a brain and being excited about school.

And that is the real tragedy here, if there is any justice at all in the world, an I realize I am talking about Texas here so there may not be, Ahmed will get off and have a good story about institutional racism to tell his friends and family somewhere down the line, but this sends a message to minority children that normally is a little less publicly stated, that message is: Don't stand out, keep to yourself, don't make us pay attention to you because the only attention we know how to give is based on fear and bigotry.

Normally this message is expressed in many silent ways, like increased detentions for people of color, a higher rate of failing grades despite doing the same, or more, work than white kids, basically all of the problems a minority person in America faces, just starting out small.

For Ahmed, it seems to have worked, as the article I linked above said: He’s vowed never to take an invention to school again.

And I can't blame him in the slightest.