Ahmed Mohamed, a 14-year-old high school student and self-described science nerd from Irving, TX, took a homemade clock to school. He showed it to his science teacher, who approved. But when it accidentally beeped in his English class and he showed it to that teacher, she reported that he had a bomb, the police were called, he was removed from school and arrested. Fingerprints and a mug shot were taken, and he was not permitted to contact his parents for several hours. Although he told everyone who questioned him that it was only a clock, he was suspended for three days for bringing a fake bomb to school. Irving police spokesman James McLellan explained, “We attempted to question the juvenile about what it was and he would simply only tell us that it was a clock.” Apparently, that was not the right answer.

Irving police chief Larry Boyd justified their overreaction by saying, “You just can’t take things like that to school.” A blogger compiled a list of seven other (presumably White) kids who brought homemade clocks to school and were not arrested. The incident raisies obvious questions about racial profiling in school disciplinary cases. (Ahmed’s family is from Somalia, so he is Black as well as Muslim.) We know from dozens of social psychological studies that ambiguous actions are interpreted differently depending on whether they come from a member of a liked or a disliked group. I’ve chosen some examples that involve possible violence or the potential for violence, since that was the issue in Ahmed’s case.

In one of Allport and Postman’s 1947 studies of rumor transmission, the initial participants were shown a drawing two men standing in a subway—a White man holding a razor and an African-American man holding nothing at all. The first person was asked to describe it to a second person who had not seen the picture, who described it to a third person, and so on. By the end of the chain of six or seven participants, the razor had jumped to the Black man’s hand almost half the time.

In an experiment by Birt Duncan, White participants were shown a videotape of an argument between a White man and a Black man. At the end of the argument, one man stomps out of the room, and in so doing, may or may not have shoved the other man aside. (The camera angle makes this deliberately ambiguous.) There are four versions of this video, consisting of all four possible combinations of a Black and a White perpetrator (the man who may have done the shoving) and victim (the man who may have been shoved). Viewers of the video were asked whether an act of violence had occurred. The incident was more likely to be labeled violent when the perpetrator was Black and when the victim was White. With a Black perpetrator and a White victim, 73% of the audience saw the incident as violent. With a White perpetrator and a Black victim, 13% saw it as violent.

I’ve written before about studies by Joshua Correll and others of the “police officer’s dilemma,” a simulation in which participants were shown slides of Black and White men standing in public places holding either a gun or an innocuous object, such as a cell phone or a soda can. The participants had half a second to press one of two keys, labeled “shoot” or “don’t shoot.” Results showed that Black men were more likely to be “shot” than White men, both when they were armed and when they were not.

Glenn Greenwald writes that Ahmed’s ordeal and other examples of Islamophobia are an almost inevitable result of 14 years of fear-mongering and official harassment of Muslims, encouraged for political gain by U. S. politicians who have been waging wars against Islamic countries for three decades.

At a town meeting in New Hampshire, the following exchange occurred between Republican front-runner Donald Trump and a man in the audience.

• Man: “We have a problem in this country, it’s called Muslims. We know our current president is one. You know, he’s not even an American. Birth certificate, man.”
• Trump: “Right. We need this question? This first question?”
• Man: “But anyway, we have training camps growing where they want to kill us.”
• Trump: “Uh-huh.”
• Man: “That’s my question: When can we get rid of them?”
• Trump: “We’re going to be looking at a lot of different things. You know, a lot of people are saying that, and a lot of people are saying that bad things are happening out there. We’re going to look at that, and plenty of other things.”

Presumably, some of those “other things” involve people who speak with a Spanish accent. Will Trump pay a political price for his failure to correct the statement that President Obama is a Muslim, and his implicit promise to deport Muslims? So far, the media have been reporting Trump’s xenophobia in a matter-of-fact way, without calling attention to historical parallels or the negative consequences of encouraging fear and hatred. Of course, the corporate media are owned by wealthy people who continue to profit from the long-term migration of bigots into the Republican party.

Update (9/19/15):

In their coverage of this Q and A, the corporate media have emphasized Trump’s failure to challenge the statement that President Obama is a Muslim. The rest of the exchange has either gone unmentioned, or the media have accepted a Trump spokesperson’s assertion that his answer referred to “training camps” rather than to Muslims generally. You can judge for yourself.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTNHZfWMihw

However, since these training camps are part of a right wing conspiracy theory and have never been shown to exist, I don’t see how it’s to Trump’s credit that he is looking into how to get rid of them.