And then #IStandWithAhmed happened and I found myself in my pajamas at two in the morning going on a Twitter rant. For those of you living under a rock, Ahmed WAS a 14 year old freshman at MacArthur high school in Irving, Texas. (The smart kid isn't going back there!)
Having just started school, he felt like a lanky brown kid who didn't know anyone. So he did what he was known for in middle school - being a gadget guru - in an attempt to interact. Little did Ahmed know that within the day he would receive tweets from both, President Obama and Mark Zuckerberg. He would become a national icon.
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| President Obama knows what's up... |
Ahmed built a clock. I myself remember building similar shit in high school wood shop. Thank god mine wasn't as techy as his, because had I gotten arrested, as Ahmed did, for constructing a 'bomb', I never would have made it. But ten years down the line, social media and an increase in social responsibility, ensured that Ahmed received the justice he deserved.
Imagine this, ya'll: a lanky brown kid in glasses wearing a NASA t-shirt walks into a classroom. He's holding a box... Oh fuck, it's a box with wires sticking out of it. What do you think it is?
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| Look at the fucking confusion on his face... |
I'm trying to stay away from the religion factor of this craziness, but for fact's sake, Ahmed is a Muslim whose parents came from Sudan. Quite honestly, I think the problem here was being brown - even it was a turban-wearing Sikh, or an overly tanned white kid with an inopportune name, it would have played out exactly the same.
The teachers at this bumfuck school did not see a clock - instead they saw a brown kid with a lot of wires, and assumed he made a bomb. The police were called and Ahmed was dragged to a juvenile detention center and questioned without any legal representation, a guardian, or a parent present or aware of the situation. I'm not delving into that, because that's just too much.
After hours of ensuring therapy would be necessary in Ahmed's future, they let him go with a 'my bad'. And the icing on the cake, he was then suspended from school!
What. The. Fuck. Y'all.
I keep waiting for Ashton Kutcher to jump out a fucking van screaming "I punk'd all y'all!"
And just because I'm growing to hate CNN, here's some shade on their news coverage... "@POTUS invites a teen accused of making a bomb to the White House"... seriously, CNN?
AND to show that no matter what life throws, people can still choose to be positive, here's a couple of pics of Ahmed's father bringing out pizzas for the media on his front lawn.
