The case of Ahmed Mohamed, the boy who built a clock, brought it to school to show his teacher, and ended up in police custody is about as clear case of rushing to judgment as we’re likely to see. It’s also, perhaps, just as clear case of hypocrisy over rushing to judgment as we’re likely to see.
This became abundantly clear to me last night when I came across a post on Facebook citing someone’s textchat transcript “proving” that the authorities in question picked on this student simply because he was Muslim. None of the evidence cited, even assuming it was true, really proves anything, as actions alone are seldom clear indicators of motives, but that is irrelevant, clearly. The perpetrators of this post assume that everyone in a questionable situation has a completely clear understanding of what is going on and knows exactly the right thing to do–they just choose not to do it.
And yet I doubt any one of them would want their own choices and actions judged by that same standard.
The main argument in the post cited is that if the school personnel involved truly thought Mohamed had a bomb, why didn’t they go all the way in over-reacting, take the bomb away from the kid, evacuate the school, and call in the bomb squad? While that is a good question, it’s not necessarily sound reasoning from which to assume the only reason is because they were all Islamophobes out to destroy this child. They were administrators put in an awkward situation, likely trying to decide between what their own eyes and intuition told them, what conflicting reports were likely telling them, and what school and district policy demands they do. More than likely at least some of the rules they were trying to follow were contradictory.
While I haven’t followed the story very closely, I’ve already seen inconsistencies in the reports of what happened. Some claim that the kid made statements that constituted a bomb threat. True or not, once someone reports that the administrators are undoubtedly required to act. Should they have evacuated the school at that point? Probably so, according to district policy. But if the administrators on the scene could easily see the clock was not a bomb, why would they do so? There would be no rational need. And yet the reported threat still had to be taken seriously.
We don’t know if whomever stated that Mohamed made an actual threat was lying, misheard/misinterpreted the child, or read more into the situation than was really there. That’s hardly the administrators’ fault. Are we not at this very moment passing legislation to force college administrators to take seriously any claim of sexual harrassment, assault, or rape on their campuses, regardless of percieved veracity? Can we expect school administrators to take a reported bomb threat any less seriously?
We’re talking about a class of people who regularly take a lot of flak over blind adherence to policies that allow now distinction between bringing an actual gun to school, pointing a finger at someone, or biting a pop-tart into the shape of a gun. They likely didn’t write those policies, and risk losing their jobs if they act contrary to them. So is refusing to evacuate the school over a clock reported to be a bomb an act of Islamophobia or actually a courageous act attempting to keep a bad situation from further spiraling out of control?
I don’t know. It could very well be exactly how these Facebook posters say. It could be that these terrible, small-minded, racist bigots (they’re from Texas, after all, and we all know that Texans are all bigots! </irony>) saw a chance to teach a minority student to mind his place. How dare he learn the things they’ve been teaching and experiment on his own! Why, next he’ll want to vote or something!
But I doubt the situation is anywhere near as clear cut as that. We’ll never know if his Muslim background truly played a factor. We have no way of knowing now whether the school would have responded the same way had Ahmed Mohamed been Aaron Martin. But considering how many school shooters and attempted bombers have been mainstream white boys, I’m not sure why it would have turned out differently. Do we know that white boys have brought homemade clocks to school without incident in the past? How do we know it was the appearance of the boy and not the appearance of the clock that caused the alarm?
I suspect that at the heart of this whole matter are people. And people are flawed, imperfect, and prone to errors in tense, unclear situations. I know I don’t do well at sorting out the “he said, she saids” between my kids. And teenagers are prone to do and say stupid things. When the clock started beeping in the middle of class, causing it to be revealed, I’m sure more than one kid in the class would jokingly call it a bomb. It wouldn’t take much for Mohamed, knowing they weren’t serious, to sarcastically state, “yeah, sure, it’s a bomb, lame-o.” And it wouldn’t take much for anyone else in that classroom to completely miss the sarcasm (we’re awfully good at that these days) and take the whole thing seriously. Boom. Instant no-win scenario for whichever school administrator in whose lap this all suddenly landed. (Oops, perhaps “boom” is the wrong expression to use here. NOTE: I am NOT making bomb threats. I don’t even have a clock with me!)
It would be a sad situation if our insistence on Zero Tolerance policies in our schools resulted in situations where our school administrators are seen as having zero tolerance for minorities who run afoul of such policies. But then its only to be expected. “Zero Tolerance, Zero Defense” is the catch-phrase of a new generation. No one is to be tolerated who might do anything that could be, with minimal to no evidence, judged as intolerant. And if they do, there is no allowable defense for them. They can’t be found guilty of the lesser crime of poor judgment. We must find them guilty of the worst interpretation of events we can find. This must be found to be racism, not technophobia, contradictory school policies, or misunderstanding.
And we cannot, must not, wait for the justice system to make sense of the conflicting facts and decide what is best. That moves too slowly for our instant-gratification world, and may result in an outcome we don’t like. We must try people in the court of social media immediately, using whatever evidence the prosecution wants to present, and with no allowance for cross-examination. Cross-examination, after all, is just victim-blaming, justification, hate-mongering, denial, and anti-science (especially when relying on actual science). We know what we know, and any amount of questioning or insistance on verification is simply undermining the outcome we simply know must be.
As I said, no one would want to be the one prosecuted under such a system. But that could never happen to them.
I have no idea what really happened in the case of Ahmed Mohamed.
Neither do you.
Even the people right at the epicenter of it all likely don’t. What happened is undoubtedly unfortunate and unfair. But oddly enough, that doesn’t give any of us special powers to determine with absolute clarity the truth of events we did not witness based on second- and third-hand reports we won’t be paying attention to long enough to know if they’re ultimately discredited or born out. The merciless wheels of social media justice will have moved on to crush someone else long before we truly know anything.
Round and round. But what goes around comes around.
