Is America’s post 9/11 education scene way different than what has come before when a 14-year-old Arab-American high school freshman gets arrested for being an electronics enthusiast?
By: Ringo Bones
During a typical Monday morning back in September 14, 2014,
a 14-year-old Arab American high school freshman of MacArthur High in Irving,
Texas named Ahmed Mohamad was arrested by the local police after his teacher
mistakes the clock that he had worked over the weekend and bought to his class’
show-and-tell for a bomb. Later investigation showed that the uproar over the
young electronic enthusiast accused of bringing a bomb to school that was later
revealed to be a “Hoax Bomb” was primarily racially motivated via the post 9/11
paranoia that is still gripping white Anglo Saxon conservative America, Ahmed
Mohamad was later invited by President Barack Obama to the White House and
given a commendation. Given the “politics” surrounding the incident, is the
post-9/11 paranoia harbored by white Anglo Saxon Protestant America hurting,
rather than helping, science education in America?
The political blowback of the “Hoax Bomb Case” incident made
Ahmed Mohamad to decide that he won’t be going back to MacArthur High anymore
after being singled-out due to his ethnicity. After all, there are white Anglo
Saxon Protestant high school students his age that were carrying loaded assault
rifles publicly in the name of the “Open Carry Law” elsewhere in Texas and
nobody dared to call them as “Christian Terrorists”? Which make one also ask if “White Supremacist
Jesus” is already the governor of Texas?
Is post the white Anglo Saxon Protestant Post 9/11 Paranoia
destroying the social fabric of diversity in America? Ahmed Mohamad could be a
case-in-point of this and it is also ruining the inclusiveness of science
education in America where kids of high school freshmen are seeing science
education as “uncool” thanks ot former US President George “Dubya” Bush. Ahmed
Mohamad’s exceptional abilities in digital electronics should have been
nurtured given that when I was his age back in the 1980s, was still learning
the rudiments of digital electronics –i.e. still learning about logic gates and
J-K flip-flops.
