If you designed a cool project, wouldn’t you want to show your teacher without suspicion?
Living in a post-9/11 America is difficult for everyone, but no more so than for Muslim-Americans like 14-year-old Ahmed Mohamed.
Mohamed, a freshman at a Texas high school, brought a homemade clock to school so he could show his engineering teacher, an act any instructor would be pleased to see.
Mohamed’s teacher said the clock was nice but that he shouldn’t show the gadget to anyone else, according to the New York Times.
Later that day, Mohamed’s clock beeped.
His teacher made him reveal the clock and played into the post-9/11 paranoia when they saw a Muslim teen pull out an object filled with wires.
Mohamed was asked to wait in the principal’s office, was questioned by police and eventually handcuffed and escorted out of the school.
He was suspended from school for three days.
We think this event demonstrates racial profiling of Muslim-Americans and the deep-seated paranoia surrounding Muslims in the United States.
Mohamed is a brilliant child who was proud of the work he had done and just wanted to show it off.
Instead, he was punished not for supposedly creating a fake bomb, but for being Muslim.
When asked if the police department would have responded differently had Mohamed been white, Irving Police Chief Larry Boyd said in a press conference that procedures conducted wouldn’t have changed.
However, the Editorial Board believes it’s a little suspicious that officials who were concerned about a bomb never called a bomb squad or evacuated a school full of children where said bomb was present.
Ahmed Mohamed’s father Mohamed El Hassan told the New York Times, “That is not America. That is not us. That is not like us,” when speaking about his son’s arrest.
In a country that prides itself on being a melting pot and treating all its citizens equally, it is painful to have events such as Mohamed’s unwarranted arrest happen.
Especially to a boy and his family that have integrated into American life.
The event surrounding Mohamed and his clock has spurred many conversations from politicians, which have further revealed the Islamophobia rampant in the U.S.
For example, a Trump supporter in New Hampshire said at a campaign event, “We have a problem in this country. It’s called Muslims. We know our current president is one. You know he’s not even an American.”
While this supporter was speaking, Trump was nodding in agreement.
On the other hand, the likes of Hillary Clinton, Mark Zuckerberg and President Obama have reached out to Mohamed, inviting him to visit Facebook and the White House.
It’s good to see our nation’s leaders and innovators supporting Mohamed when so many others are using this event to spew hate.
We think the hyper vigilance for domestic terrorism in the U.S. prevalent after 9/11 has caused Islamophobia to spread across the country, leading to events of racial profiling like Mohamed’s case.
The events of one horrible day do not define a religion or a group of people.
If we, as a country, celebrate our diversity, then we need to stop making assumptions of people’s behavior based on their name, skin color and religion.
