Re:14-Year-Old Boy Arrested for Bringing Homemade Clock to S...
by jerf on Wednesday September 16, 2015 @02:31PM
(#10228740)
You can not assert a consistent behavior off of one example. You're finding something you seem to be looking for. I was not kidding about being arrested and getting ordered to not touch computers for some period of time. Wigs have been flipped.
I do not know that school administrators have "consistently" flipped out at white kids, either. I don't know what the baseline occurrence of these events are. My suspicion would be that every case we've ever heard of, including this one, is still an outlier, and thus not suitable for drawing sweeping conclusions from, and in fact kids probably do stupid stuff like this every day without making the national news.
Of course they have. However, the authorities everywhere don't consistently flip their wigs—certainly not as badly as this—every time a student does something like bringing in this project. So the fact that they wigged out badly in this particular case probably—not certainly, but really pretty likely—does have some relation to the fact that the student just happened to be Ahmed Mohamed.
(OTOH there pretty certainly is a selection bias in the fact that this particular case is getting so much publicity. It's the social-media catnip of the perceived (and again, let's be serious here, probably partly real) discrimination that has pushed this one up the charts while others go mostly unremarked.)