It had very little to do with the school system. If the kid was white it wouldn't have happened.

I was expelled from 7th grade (1996) for just holding a toy gun[1] (a friend brought it to school, but let me play with it, which lasted for about 5 minutes). The superintendent said they had a zero tolerance policy for guns and lookalikes after Columbine. My mother made an embarrassingly huge fuss about how overboard they were going, and ended up getting the expulsion overturned at a sort of appeal "hearing", which resulted in me missing just 3 days of school. It was a really stressful situation. I'm Caucasian.

1. Something like this: http://thumbs.dreamstime.com/z/orange-plastic-water-pistol-i...

Note: I brought this up to my mom and she pointed out that it was a shooting in Washington, not Columbine, that had the schools paranoid.

White children are arrested for stupid things all the time too. I went to highschool with a kid who got arrested for installing VNC server on a school computer.

Oh for sure. But non-white kids are automatically viewed with greater suspicion/less likely to be believed.

But the fundamental problem is that it shouldn't matter - you can't legislate away bigotry. In fact, attempting to do so just creates resentment which is passed to the next generation.

You can legislate a sane school/legal environment that removes the arbitrary and capricious power from possible bigots, overreactors, and other adult bullies.

That's what really pissed me off about this charade. It would have been the perfect opportunity to talk about how fucked up our school administrations and their "zero tolerance" policies are, and instead everyone wasted their time rehashing the same old arguments about race that we have every day, that everyone has already made up their minds about.

> It would have been the perfect opportunity to talk about how fucked up our school administrations and their "zero tolerance" policies are, and instead everyone wasted their time rehashing the same old arguments about race that we have every day

Actually, most of the early response from public critics -- and most of the major-actor outreach to counter the official sanction directed at the student -- seemed to focus largely on the lack of sensibility of the administration and it being a failure of authoritarianism stifling harmless youthful experimentation. There was some speculation about the official reaction potentially having racist motivation, but the issue becoming principally about racial and/or religious bigotry really kind of took off as defenders of the actions by the school (or those just wanting to bash Obama because politics) started arguing that the student must have been guilty of doing something wrong, even if it wasn't actually building a bomb, because of his families background.

Zero tolerance policies effect everyone. I'm sure if the kid was white he would be treated exactly the same. Now, it depends what kind of white kid, certainly. The captain of the football team? Probably a slap on the wrist. Anyone who wears black more than a day a month? Definitely getting arrested.

According to the district documents, the policies for a "look-alike weapon" are the same as those for a weapon -- see:

http://www.irvingisd.net/cms/lib010/TX01917973/Centricity/Do...

http://pol.tasb.org/Policy/Download/367?filename=FOD(LEGAL)....

Zero-tolerance policies do disproportionally damage students of color (like many policies in most countries...) but they're perfectly capable of damaging white students as well, and it's almost certainly false to say that if a nerdy, technophillic white kid brought a strange device to a Texas school, he wouldn't be arrested for possessing a "look-alike" bomb.

That's easy to say, but impossible to know. If the kid matches the right profile with the wrong teacher, there are plenty of scenarios where a white kid gets arrested for this.

America has been deeply suspicious of nerdy white boys since Columbine. That's not to say Muslim kids don't get discriminated against. My brother in law had a hard time in post 9/11 Virgina because he's Afghan.