In my very similar case, I was suspended and subsequently offered to be sued or to quit school by the school board in my Mississippi hometown (100-200k pop). It was in 11th grade in 2002-2003. My mother was not even involved. I quit, because we were a poor family raking in $600/mo. Sue was an unfathomable word. Things worked out for me, but that's dumb luck.
My criminal case? I ran the ping -t from a windows cmd prompt to see if an IRC server (I administrated) had rebooted. Screenshot evidence of my hardship on their servers and the 'attack' on my own server could not be argued.
My earlier suspension (1064 pop town in MS) was for bringing a flute made from cane to school. It was a project item for art where we had to make a musical instrument. The cane was considered a physical assault device. I was suspended, had to walk home, and faced 3 months of Saturday school. My art teacher was the one who claimed it was a weapon.
My wife was driven home by the school principal (alone at 14) in the first town because she 'appeared drugged', and no parents were there and she was left on the porch. She was given a Benadryl for allergies. She was suspended afterwards.
I do not really have this association due to the events that took place with the ping scenario. I just assumed they felt they were doing the right thing and negating any side effects from something that was misunderstood.
The flute situation on the other hand seems like an almost personal attack, but that's just petty nonsense that quickly fades with time.
My wife's scenario (and various others) still has an impact to this day.
One thing that people haven't been pointing out enough is that the administrators didn't make the mistake when they questioned Ahmed about this device. If there's even the smallest chance that it could cause harm, they need to investigate. What they did wrong is everything after they learned that it wasn't harmful or anything resembling a weapon. They should have apologized and then sent him on his merry way. Instead, they're doubling down on this "no tolerance" BS and taking it out on a kid who has done nothing to deserve it. It's ridiculous. /endrant
School administrators should investigate whenever there's the slightest bit of harm? That would be an awful allocation of resources, only made wise because of fear of lawsuit. It would also be a theatrical exercise in neuroticism.
Sounds like schools should appropriate part of their budget for threat consultation.
I think you're not appreciating that most people don't know anything about electronics. So a bunch of wires and LEDs does in fact look very scary from their perspective, and you know.. better be safe than sorry.
Would it have been better if the school staff were all familiar with electronics projects? Sure.. but that's not the reality we live in
Well, then, why not consult a subject matter expert? They didn't ask his teacher or any of his potentially qualified colleagues; the police didn't consult anyone on their staff who might have been as knowledgeable. They didn't even try their bomb squad. There's no suggestion that even a semblance of a credible investigation took place.
Why should school policy be driven by how scared somebody gets, as opposed to statistics? If I look more into how scared people get by LEDs and wires, will I understand how staff attention and resources should be allocated to investigating any potential threat, no matter how small?
It doesn't take a subject matter expert to realize that electronics not attached to an explosive of some kind are just electronics, if all you see is a clock, then its just a clock.
If you think that is an "awful allocation of resources" I have to ask if you have ever attended a public school in America. My old highschool had an on-staff copy lady who would take 3hr lunch breaks. Her job was 100% useless because every room had a printer. All they needed was ink and paper.
Part of the problem is Hollywood's reliance on tropes like the beeping timebomb with bright red LED countdowns and scary-looking wires, and then people judging reality based on what they see on 24 and CSI.
> If there's even the smallest chance that it could cause harm, they need to investigate.
What?! That's just fundamentally mislead as to the nature of life. Everything has the possibility to cause harm. Absolute harm reduction is horribly mislead and will be used to end anything like freedom. This is not the answer!
How small of a chance are talking about? 1 in a hundred? 1in a billion? 1 in a billion billion? The backpack the clock was in can do more harm, yet it wasn't investigated.
This was made very clear to me when I went to high school (from 2004-2009). If you had a gun, or a toy gun, or two pieces of wood nailed at a right angle and held like a gun, and you so much as brought it onto the school grounds, you would be handed over to the police and recommended for expulsion.
I'm 100% sure that next week, at least one high school kid will be expelled for something like this. It won't make the news, because there won't be a fleet of outraged tumblr users to champion the kid, because he won't have a name like Ahmed Mohammed. Probably he'll be black, because hey, school to prison pipeline has to pump, but he could just as easily be white.
It's not like the school administrators have any leeway in enforcing district policy. The principal would get fired if he just went "Well, you brought something that we have to expel you for, but you're a good kid, don't do it again." That's how you get favoritism and corruption and it's not something we should try to encourage.
Instead, we should attack the actual problem here, which is the zero tolerance policy. You can't get Donald Trump soundbytes about zero tolerance policies, but that's the actual problem.
I doubt they acted outside of there authority under the law. That does not mean the post 911 paranoia is reasonable, but the root problem is the Patriot Act style legislation. Administrators, Judges and Police have to fallow the law whether it makes sense or not there is just as big a chance the administrators get a lawsuit from over protective paranoid parents then the reverse.
The authors trying to shoehorn this story into identity politics is unfortunately predicable click bait at this point. It just detracts form the actual issue which is overboard paranoid legislation which makes these incidents more likely.
I'm glad he said this is a problem with America and not just Texas. Zero tolerance is hurting kids with bringing scissors to school or handing Advil out for headaches. It's probably one of the most distructive policies we could ever have.
It's "zero responsibility": any administrator can simply point to the "zero tolerance" policy and claim to be following the established rules. It's entirely a CYA measure for staff, and has nothing to do with the well-being of students.
That's what I've always loved about the "random" screenings at security lines in the airport. "We need you to turn on your laptop." and "Give us your bag so that we can swab it" are inane. If you think it's a bomb, everyone should be removed and no one should be allowed to touch it, at all. It's all just theater and no one gives a damn. It's sad.
last month we were coming back to brazil from denver, when her backpack was flagged for "inspection". when i asked the TSA officer why, she was quite polite and said "the x-ray inspector said there's a water bottle on her backpack". we were 100% sure that there was nothing like that because we triple checked before getting into the line.
when the 'inspector' looked at her bag and the x-ray image on the monitor, it was not the same bag. the x-ray guy marked the wrong bag for inspection and the bag with the water bottle was already gone. the inspector apologized and let us go.
my wife's question after we were gone was: "if they think water bottles could be bombs, shouldn't they close the airport?"
That isn't really what that test is about. They don't think there's a 99% or even 80% chance that it's a bomb. They think there might be a 0.0001% chance that it's a bomb so they're going to test (along with hundreds, thousands and eventually millions of others that nobody thinks might be bomb) just to put off anybody thinking that this is an effective way to smuggle a bomb onto a plane.
Let say you are a terrorist, would you try to bring a bomb through security like that?
Situation A: They mostly never check bags because they need to close the airport for it.
Situation B: They mostly check bags.
Just increasing the odds of being checked is a deterrent.
> A bomb in a security checkpoint is just as, if not more, scary and deadly.
Is it really? I'm not that good in physic but a plane that explode, or that's hijacked does at least 100 deaths, and has the potential to do even more. Could you do that at a security checkpoint?
> Let say you are a terrorist, would you try to bring a bomb through security like that? Situation A: They mostly never check bags because they need to close the airport for it. Situation B: They mostly check bags.
B doesn't exist though. The TSA has an abysmal record of passing tests. They mostly don't check bags, and if they did check one with a bomb, the attacker could make it go kaboom. You don't think that would make the public fearful? "Bomb at Security Checkpoint" as a headline would be terrifying to most people.
> Is it really? I'm not that good in physic but a plane that explode, or that's hijacked does at least 100 deaths, and has the potential to do even more. Could you do that at a security checkpoint?
Have you ever been to a security checkpoint? At a larger airport there is easily hundreds of people in line, usually in a confined space.
Probably but my point is all about fear of getting caught before succeeding. Does the truth matter as much as the fear?
> You don't think that would make the public fearful? "Bomb at Security Checkpoint" as a headline would be terrifying to most people.
Well finding a bomb doesn't mean it will actually explode and as long as the number of death is way smaller, they would have way better target than that (one that doesn't have a ton of security guards and multiple layer to stop you).
> Have you ever been to a security checkpoint? At a larger airport there is easily hundreds of people in line, usually in a confined space.
I haven't no but by what I see they aren't in confined space, the walls are far away, and they are one in front of the other, acting like human shield.
> Probably but my point is all about fear of getting caught before succeeding.
My point is that the fall back is not "go to jail", the fall back would be "blow up the security line."
Also, are random chemical checks (which are looking for something very rare by sampling a very small population, hmmmm) any more helpful than the screenings that are also taking place, notably X-ray imaging?
> Does the truth matter as much as the fear?
No, it matters much less it seems :(
> Well finding a bomb doesn't mean it will actually explode
In context, the hypothetical headline meant a bomb had gone off.
> as the number of death is way smaller, they would have way better target than that (one that doesn't have a ton of security guards and multiple layer to stop you).
Smaller than what? 50 people vs 100? 100 vs 200? it's still a terrible thing and will have a very similar affect on the public.
> I haven't no but by what I see they aren't in confined space, the walls are far away,
Most of the ones I've been in are basically tunnels are bridges 100' or so across. Sometimes the lines themselves pour out into the rest of the terminal, which is less confined.
> and they are one in front of the other, acting like human shield.
I honestly couldn't tell you how people squashed together would work, from a physics perspective, but I don't think it's pretty or clean regardless.
This all detracts from the main topic: their scanning procedures are antithetical (and statistically suspect) to the handling (and rarity) of what they're looking for.
I will reiterate my point. What I'm saying is that it's a security theater, it's there so terrorist are afraid of being stopped. That's how I feel TSA work right now.
> My point is that the fall back is not "go to jail", the fall back would be "blow up the security line."
Yeah I understood that point, that's exactly why I said succeeding. You can get caught, thus you are stopped and can't do your plan, probably for ever.
> Also, are random chemical checks (which are looking for something very rare by sampling a very small population, hmmmm) any more helpful than the screenings that are also taking place, notably X-ray imaging?
I don't know, my whole point is that the fear of getting caught and not actually killing the number of people you want to kill, or hijacking the plane you were supposed to can be a deterrent. The more you increase that fear (by increasing checkpoint), the more it's a deterrent.
> No, it matters much less it seems :(
As long as they believe they can get caught, isn't it enough?
> In context, the hypothetical headline meant a bomb had gone off.
10 deaths, 50 victims in the hospital is clearly less fearful than, "Plane hijacked because of a bomb on board, 200 deaths, still counting...".
> Smaller than what? 50 people vs 100? 100 vs 200? it's still a terrible thing and will have a very similar affect on the public.
I'm curious, in your hypothetical situation what would be the alternative? That bomb wouldn't be on board of the plane? Sure it's a terrible thing... but the alternative is worst...
> Most of the ones I've been in are basically tunnels are bridges 100' or so across. Sometimes the lines themselves pour out into the rest of the terminal, which is less confined.
Yeah in theses cases that's not a good idea, any crowded place in a confined space are bad idea too...
> This all detracts from the main topic: their scanning procedures are antithetical (and statistically suspect) to the handling (and rarity) of what they're looking for.
Yeah I'm not saying they are not, again that wasn't my point at all.
From a statics point of view, there are no terrorists. But let's assume there are, only a dumb one would be afraid of being caught in line.
But let us suppose you are right, TSA deters the boogeyman. So instead he will just attack something else. But were are all these attacks? Why do we assume only planes will be attacked?
> only a dumb one would be afraid of being caught in line
Really? You begin to say they are statically insignificant and then follow by saying they wouldn't care with failed operations. That doesn't seems like an intelligent solution when you doesn't have much opportunities. I'm pretty sure by giving your life you would hope to kill more than a few dozen people... which you can do pretty much anywhere.
Sadly, any potential solutions will always seems like they aren't effective because of the likelihood of an attack.
> Why do we assume only planes will be attacked?
Who assume that? I don't...
All we can do is minimize the ratio effort:death, that include not having a huge crowd in a confined space. I remember a documentary about train technology to limit death in trains, I don't remember the conclusion, but the goal wasn't to stop explosion, just to limit death. Sure any death is bad but no solution will be perfect.
TSA was not created in response to unforesern attacks on airplanes creating a new percroved need (those happened before) but to unforeseen use of airliners as weapons. Other transportation systems may be equally attractive as targets, but few, if any, are equally exploitable as weapons.
Have you ever been to a security checkpoint? At a larger airport there is easily hundreds of people in line, usually in a confined space
Absolutely. Some of the security lines at an airport like O'Hare are crowded enough that you could easily take out 100 people (or more) with a bomb sitting 2 feet from the TSA agent's podium. All of this TSA stuff, even if it were effective, would only be effective at moving the problem, not at eliminating it. Any smart terrorist in 2015 would look at this situation and say "let me detonate my bomb in the security line" instead of even bothering trying to get it on a plane. An even smarter terrorist might blow the bomb up in a movie theater or at a football game.
It would still be fairly easily to smuggle a bomb through security. But it would be even easier to smuggle it in through one of the other entry points into the airport. Or just build a bomb with stuff found on the inside.
"Please dump that liquid we think is an explosive into the trash can containing other liquids we suspect are explosives. The trash can that everyone is standing near."
It's difficult how much of this is a race issue and how much if it is a zero tolerance issue.
At first I wanted to say, "If he were white today the same thing would have happened," but the more I imagine a nerdy white kid with circuit board in a case, the more I think that race played a big role.
Mmm. I'm not so sure that race ever had anything to do with it.
Cover-your-ass security theater entirely incentivizes responding to every possible issue with the most drastic possible response. There is no incentive to worry about the side-effects of putting a 14 year old on the "no fly list". Instead, they're all trying as hard as possible to make sure that they're not the person that okayed somebody bringing a bomb to the science fair.
Of course everything they've done after the science teacher cleared things up has been incredibly wrong...
How does an imagining of a nerdy white kid provided you with some factual evidence this story has anything to do with ethnicity. These stories happen now and then. Its ridiculous yes, but don't fall for identity politics click bait nonsense.
I obviously have no evidence to back this up, (I'm not sure what evidence there could possibly be outside of a long psychology study) but I could imagine a white kid in my High School getting away with it while an Arab was instantly questioned.
I live in a very, very conservative area, where minorities are given a lot of crap.
I'm white and I got suspended because people on the hockey team who had been bullying me for years alleged I owned books containing bomb-making instructions. It took my mom arguing my case in a special meeting with the principal, a rep from the district, and a guidance counselor to get claims of anti-semetism removed from my record (because I was and am an atheist and had expressed the viewpoint that religion was a social ill).
If I had brought to school what Ahmed did, I probably would have been dropped with two to the chest and one in the head by the school cop and then double-tapped on the ground. Maybe I just would have been tased, handcuffed, arrested, and recommended for expulsion as per the school district's zero tolerance policy, but since I had long hair and wore lots of black clothing at the time my school probably regarded me as the most likely Columbine copycat candidate and would have reacted appropriately.
Ironically, this was in an affluent area with plenty of wealthy foreigners living in the US. There were a few Muslim students at my school, and aside from juvenile idiots I'm sure there was almost no islamophobia, and certainly none on the institutional level. But everyone has stereotypes they fear, and if you fall into that as a child in the school system god help you.
It's fine to react drastically when you don't know what you are dealing with. Their first react was correct. Everything after it was confirmed that it was an innocent clock was wrong. That is the part where I think racism is playing it role.
When I was in school, I was almost arrested at my school for having phreaker box diagrams in my backpack, which was searched illegally (do kids in public school actually have privacy rights anyway?) by police after an unrelated complaint. I was unfairly targeted this way many times in different schools. I am as white as they come. This is not a brown vs non-brown issue; all schools treat their intelligent, inquisitive students like criminals. I say this having attended five different middle + high schools, public, magnet and private.
I am so happy to be in Germany. A teacher once asked me to give her my phone (we were forbidden to use phones in school), so I put it in my bag and closed it.
She instantly went to the director, who then started to discuss it with me (after 45 minutes of him shouting at me in a hallway, which had become a public attraction, he gave up), but at no point did anyone try to access my bag.
The fact that my parents studied law might have something to do with it, though, so I’m not sure if other people would have been treated the same.
> I’m angry, and I’m a little upset with myself because I want to be useful.
I'm thinking the same thing. What I'm wishing is that I held a position of influence at a private high school, so I could offer him immediate entrance and a full scholarship. Mostly to correct the injustice, but also because he's clearly a top student: unassisted home-made clock trumps perfect SSATs.
So if anybody reading this has such a position -- even a little bit -- please try to make it happen.
Can anyone explain how you can immediately attribute any of this to outright racism and his brown skin, when the staff and students are predominantly non-white in that school.
You pulled a fast one there by linking to student body data and claiming admin and teachers are non-white.
It is quite likely that the school district administration and teachers are mostly white. Multiple reasons for this,
1. Brown people are recent (~last 25 years) immigrants in most cities. Remember, up until 1960s you had citizenship quotas and racist immigration policies.
2. By being recent immigrants, they are less likely to be part of the police force, political establishment, city administration, and so on. It takes a minimum of 10-15 years before someone who has entered the US becomes a citizen. School districts, etc. seldom employ H1Bs or other immigrants.
3. Most brown immigrants come to the US as refugees, illegal immigrants, or skilled labor. That creates a bit of a bimodal distribution in everything from income to educational outcomes of their children. Teachers, school administration, etc. do not, in general fit into the ends of this bimodal distribution. There are obviously many, many, exceptions, but I'd hypothesize that brown people are severely underrepresented among school district administrators, school teachers, policemen, etc.
> You pulled a fast one there by linking to student body data and claiming admin and teachers are non-white.
What I'm claiming is it's unlikely to be blatant white on brown racism when 9 out of 10 students are non-white and 50% of the school admin panel is non-white.
The media is making this out to be some type of a racial profiling case... Where a lone brown student in a class of all whites is singled-out due to his skin color and name.
Racism is the unequal distribution of privilege, and goods dependent on race. It does not deal with race distribution in a population. However seeing racism should even be more apparent when the race with power is in the minority population. A good example would be South Africa in apartheid; or the south during segregation.
But basically if this kid was white, and was named Chris(the christian equivalent of Mohamed).. He would not have been subjugated to any of this. That is privilege that is racism.
Racism is the individual or collective act of blindly favoring one race over another, or hurting one race over another. There's this thing called the dictionary. If you don't like the definitions in there, come up with a new word and definition!
You have no evidence that this wouldn't happen to a white kid, but that's the most likely outcome. If this were pre-9/11 (pre-Patriot Act BS), I'm not so sure. Racism and prejudice to some extent is just part of the human condition.
Perhaps one day we'll advance enough to make it a non-issue, but we need to stop the hysterics about "only in America" and "whites always get favored" without some concrete evidence and historical context.
1. I never said "only in America". Racism, and classism are prevalent all over the world. My example even lists both a US and Foreign example. And racism isn't only with whites.
2. There is tons of evidence that whites get favored in pretty much everything from home loans borrowing rates, being accepted to rent a house, pay, and the number of times they get pulled over by a cop.
Fair enough. I was alluding to some other comments I had seen.
As for your evidence, I think you're going out on a limb with "whites get favored in pretty much everything". While that may have been true up until the 1960s, we've progressed to Barack Obama and Oprah. Still a very long way to go with regards to the specific things you mentioned (some of which may be more socioeconomic factors rather than skin color), but your claim just doesn't hold water.
Watch nearly any episode of the TV show, "What would you do". There are often examples of people giving some* the benefit of the doubt when they are in fact stealing, etc, while others are reported immediately to the police.
In the context of this show:
* "some" are always white and/or female
"others" are some white males, and all non-white males.
I've never watched the show, but when one group of people is disproportionately represented in crime statistics, in some cases by a factor of 30x, then it's just common sense rather than benefit-of-the-doubt.
The problem with that definition is that it assumes all groups contribute equally to the larger collective. Or at least that if one group contributes less, it is entirely because the other groups have already disadvantaged it in some way.
There are a large number of examples where this is simply false.
That definition makes no assumption about a groups contribution; as the definition is indifferent of the socio-economic system at hand (free-market, closed market, communal, etc) if the distribution of privilege and goods is different for individuals depending on race then there is a system of racism at hand.
So if 1 racial demographic group does better than another group, and they profit (in some way related to privileged) from this, while the other group does not, how is this racism?
I also find it odd how this is immediately chalked up to racism instead of simply assuming that the school administrators are simply overzealous about "something that somebody thought looked/sounded like a bomb". I mean, it certainly _could_ be racism, but there isn't really any evidence at the moment to say that it _is_ racism.
People want to see the problems their preferred media has taught them to be enraged about (or, has taught them is a problem the other team is irrationally concerned about).
Sometimes it's wanting to find the racial injustice that increases the sensitivity to other injustices.
While the student's race might have played a role in the punishment, I'm at least as suspicious that it has played a role in increasing media coverage of it. Of course both assessments are non-falsifiable when limited to this one specific case.
No big brand really focuses on the increasingly authortarian nature of American society, especially not in the treatment of minors. Although they'll pay lip service to it every now and again when it's useful fodder for other topics.
Racism is currently fashionable in the press and it plays to a core progressive narrative. The people doing so mean well, but unfortunately don't realize the price of this intellectual laziness is to completely alienate anybody else. People mostly care about problems that apply to themselves, so framing a problem as happening to "others" is actually extremely counter productive.
PS: read for understanding instead of just trying to stoke your fauxrage.
I think people are downvoting you because of your implied suggestion that the issue of racism in the US should be approached from the perspective of white people, which is pretty messed up.
How, exactly, is it "pretty messed up" ? I'd think if your goal was to convince the majority of something, you would look for ways to convince that majority of something. Like perhaps that their own kids could very well be arrested and traumatized in exactly this manner.
Reducing racism gets us more "benefit of the doubt" that might have resolved the situation informally. But it does nothing to change school administrators thinking that turning a 14 year old over to the police on a whim is an appropriate thing to do.
In this specific case I'm just glad this kid is actually innocent so that he can hopefully disassociate the event from himself and see that the school and police are horribly broken. Imagine if the arrest had been "justified" for accidentally bringing a pocket knife or aspirin to school - what kind of lasting psychological damage does that cause?
Race data in the US typically groups Middle Eastern people into the white box. And I think people are specifically calling out perceived anti Muslim bias. Even though almost all domestic terror attacks are done by white men
Sadly, Ahmed is being taught a lesson that all minorities in the US learn as part of growing up. Just like African American kids are taught to be terrified of the police and other authorities. If they behave the same as white kids or make similar assumptions about how the power structure interacts with them, then they're going to get murdered or punished in unfair ways.
I'd like to think the overwhelming majority of people share your complete disdain and frustration at this terrible story.
Racism is a problem, and we should be discussing it out in the open, facing it head on.
> If I had been a black kid? No way. I can’t imagine that the teachers of a white, white, white suburban Boston high school would have patted me on the head for all of that. Opening unlocked doors would have been taken as breaking and entering. If I told them that I’d put in a lot of time to decipher the mechanical workings of a common school lock and how to exploit its weaknesses, they’d have assumed the only reason I’d have gone to all of that trouble was because I planned to steal stuff, not because I was intellectually excited by an intriguing puzzle.
Too polarized and emotional. There is a problem, yes. But that doesn't mean that all teachers will treat a black or brown child differently from the white one. And also America is not the worst case. Here in Ukraine almost everyone hates black and brown people.
Of course America isn't the worst case - but the point is kind of at the heart of the matter, and minimizing the issue just because the issue is even worse elsewhere is nonsensical.
When on vacation in Poland, I had the opportunity to meet some Ukrainian emigrants. And they asked me in Polish, in earnest: "...so, are black people dangerous? I hear there are a lot of them in America."
Absolutely. (Although bear in mind that the term 'African-American' for someone with brown skin is American-centric, and other countries don't use it. Luckily WA understood you.)
On the other side of the coin, while visiting Dallas on work from Europe, I was asked, quite seriously, whether I was worried about the the Muslim campaign to control Europe by outbreeding the natives (or something, I'm not good at remembering this stuff). I don't think they'd ever met a Muslim in their life.
There is a large Muslim population in the Dallas area. The problem is a combination of (self or social) segregation and poor integration of the immigrant communities.
Not knowing members of your society just because you have preconceived notions about them is pathetic, but painfully real.
> When on vacation in Poland, I had the opportunity to meet some Ukrainian emigrants. And they asked me in Polish, in earnest: "...so, are black people dangerous? I hear there are a lot of them in America."
> They had never met a black person in real life.
So their only impression of what African Americans are really like is presumably formed via American media?
Here in Ukraine almost everyone hates black and brown people.
I knew some Ukrainian girls over the years and they seemed to me like good people with no racial prejudices towards people of other ethnicities and they blended very well with non Caucasian people.
Maybe you're hanging out with neo Nazis and ultra nationalist nutjobs and then extrapolating this to all Ukrainians?
Maybe Ukrainians that you meet in a foreign country are naturally going to be more cosmopolitan than the larger percentage remaining at home in Ukraine.
There is zero evidence this story has anything to do with the child's ethnicity except the insinuation from a Tech Crunch article to stir up clicks. This fallow on Blog post is silly, American style race baiting and hyperbole.
The post 911 Patriot Act paranoia of the American authorities is ridiculous, but pleas do not get sucked in by click bait demagogues. There is no bottom the stupidity when it comes to these stories. There has been several cringe worthy stories of this type in the past few years about people with "homemade gadgets".
Im from a very white, rural town. In 2005 I was a Junior and a kid got suspended for bringing a 3 foot section of 2x4 to school. He was white. We live in a zero tolerance time, Ahmed brought a bundle of electronics and a ticking clock. It wasn't a good idea. Should it have been handled better? Yes, of course. But we live in a shitty time where two yahoos can learn to make a bomb online and cause mass destruction (see Boston Marathon Bombing).
A kid can cut out the pages from a book and hide a circuitboard in a book. Should we ban books from schools? No. A kid can put a piece of benign electronics in a backpack and just leave it in a crowded area without telling anyone.should we ban backpacks from schools? No.
The answer to stupid overreaction isn't to say that benign educational activities are stupid; It is to stop overreaction.
Im sorry, was I approving the overreaction? No. Im saying I don't think its truly race motivated and that a High schooler should be knowledgable enough to know how it may appear. Maybe he could have left it with his shop teacher or gotten a note from the teacher. The teacher would have saved the kid some trouble since the teacher obviously thought it wouldn't be great if another teacher saw it.
Imagine if it was a bomb how the media would be damning the school for not acting.
Imagine? Shoes can be a bomb. Any backpack could contain a bomb. An electronic thing with lights and a battery is no more likely to be a bomb. This whole manufactured issue is simply Idiocracy at work.
To be fair, banning backpacks might have other purposes beyond "security"; for example, carrying around a bunch of books on your back can contribute to spinal stress, cause or worsen scoliosis, etc.
When I was in middle school I found a note on the ground while walking to my next class with writings about how this person hated the school and wanted to blow it up. I was 12, I didnt think much of it and handed it off to a nosy friend who wanted to read it too. Well she turned it in and said I found it, I was interrogated (at the school to be fair) for an hour and half by the principle and a police office without once having called my parents. Zero tolerance man.
This made me think about a book I had read where it stated Humans are very bad at estimating risk. I think it could have been Nate Silver's book The Signal and Noise. It might have even been the Black Swan by Nassim Taleb
Let's not pretend that his name had nothing to do with it; it's all cute acting PC but let's get real. I've lived in Texas and the racism/segregation is very subtle but it's there (generally speaking).
I find it funny that as an outsider that Americans don't let their kids walk/play alone in their neighborhood because "they are so naive and innocent", and there are child/sexual predators out there. Yet they somehow believe the same kid named Ahmed (guilt by association?) can somehow conjure up a bomb.
My criminal case? I ran the ping -t from a windows cmd prompt to see if an IRC server (I administrated) had rebooted. Screenshot evidence of my hardship on their servers and the 'attack' on my own server could not be argued.
My earlier suspension (1064 pop town in MS) was for bringing a flute made from cane to school. It was a project item for art where we had to make a musical instrument. The cane was considered a physical assault device. I was suspended, had to walk home, and faced 3 months of Saturday school. My art teacher was the one who claimed it was a weapon.
My wife was driven home by the school principal (alone at 14) in the first town because she 'appeared drugged', and no parents were there and she was left on the porch. She was given a Benadryl for allergies. She was suspended afterwards.