The Infuriating Absurdity of the US Racial Condition — Is Concisely Symbolized by the Arrest of a Brown Skinned Kid and His Clock in a Texas School

© 2015 Peter Free

 

18 September 2015

 

 

Theme

 

The fact that this bigoted incident had to go through at least three levels of pre-arrest review and the (essentially false) arrest still took place, must make Americans look like unredeemable idiots to the sane rest of the world.

 

 

Assuming that the facts have been adequately reported — how people in supposed authority become this brain dead escapes me

 

From Dallas’ Star-Telegram:

 

 

[Ahmed] Mohamed, a tinkerer who enjoyed his middle school robotics class, took a hastily patched-together digital clock to MacArthur to show off to his new teachers.

 

His English teacher wasn’t happy when the alarm went off in class.

 

After class, he stopped to show her the device — a circuit board and power supply wired to a digital display.

 

“She was like, ‘It looks like a bomb,’ ” he said.

 

“I told her, ‘It doesn’t look like a bomb to me.’ ”

 

She kept the device, and during the next period, the school principal and a police officer pulled Mohamed out of class.

 

“He showed it to a teacher, and it was suspicious in nature,” Irving Police Chief Larry Boyd said. “The student told the teacher it was a clock, but he was not forthcoming with any other details about it.”

 

Mohamed said he was questioned without a lawyer or a relative present. He said he repeatedly said the device was a clock.

 

About 3 p.m., he was arrested and led from the school in handcuffs. He was quickly released to his parents.

 

He was also suspended for three days.

 

Irving police announced Wednesday that they will not pursue the case against Mohamed.

 

© 2015 Monica S. Nagy and Domingo Ramirez Jr, Irving teen headed to White House with clock that got him suspended, Dallas Star-Telegram (16 September 2015)

 

 

Think about the steps in this process of escalating bigotry

 

The alarm apparently went off in class, but the English teacher evidently did nothing.

 

Mohamed afterward showed the teacher his home-made clock. The teacher freaked — apparently put off by his brown-skin and his possibly “Muslim” name.

 

Evidently English-teaching is not an occupation that requires adept critical thinking or demeanor evaluation. The teacher appears to have missed the fact that a bomb most likely would have exploded when its alarm went off. And further, that Mohammed probably would not have shown him/her a device that he intended to murder himself and everyone else with. Consequently, according to the BBC, some of the authorities involved concluded that the clock was a hoax bomb.

 

The school principal — Review’s Level Two — subsequently decided that Mohammed was a threat (whether bomb or fake IED).

 

He/she also overlooked the logical inferences that the teacher had missed. And presumedly was equally obtuse in misreading the young man’s probably innocent (although adolescent) demeanor. Moved by the same bigotry — or lack of common sense — the principal involved or acceded to the cop(s).

 

Now at Level Three of pre-arrest review, the Morons in Blue carted Mohamed off in handcuffs because — well, what else ya gonna do with a Muslim-looking clock-builder?

 

 

The moral? — This is the kind of extrapolated ridiculousness that must motivate a lot of oppressed people to build bombs in self-defense

 

We all know what would have happened, if the student with the concocted clock had been both white and “legitimately American” looking.

 

“That’s nice, dear. Please don’t let the clock ring in my class again.”

 

If we wonder about the origin of race and culture-based rage, this kind of thing pretty much explains it.