{"id":127,"date":"2015-09-18T16:25:02","date_gmt":"2015-09-18T20:25:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/l-stires.com\/thinking-slowly\/?p=127"},"modified":"2015-09-19T16:10:54","modified_gmt":"2015-09-19T20:10:54","slug":"the-muslim-clock-strikes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/l-stires.com\/thinking-slowly\/the-muslim-clock-strikes\/","title":{"rendered":"The Muslim Clock Strikes"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/p>Ahmed Mohamed, a 14-year-old high school student<\/a> 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<\/a>, \u201cWe attempted to question the juvenile about what it was and he would simply only tell us that it was a clock.\u201d Apparently, that was not the right answer.\n

\"Ahmed<\/a>
Ahmed the terrorist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Irving police chief Larry Boyd\u00a0justified their overreaction by saying<\/a>, \u201cYou just can\u2019t take things like that to school.\u201d A blogger compiled a list<\/a> 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\u2019s 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\u2019ve chosen some examples that involve possible violence or the potential for violence, since that was the issue in Ahmed\u2019s case.<\/p>\n

In one of Allport and Postman\u2019s 1947 studies of rumor transmission<\/a>, the initial participants were shown a drawing two men standing in a subway\u2014a 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\u2019s hand almost half the time.<\/p>\n

In an experiment by Birt Duncan<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve written before<\/a> about studies by Joshua Correll and others of the \u201cpolice officer\u2019s dilemma<\/a>,\u201d 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 \u201cshoot\u201d or \u201cdon\u2019t shoot.\u201d Results showed that Black men were more likely to be \u201cshot\u201d than White men, both when they were armed and when they were not.<\/p>\n

Glenn Greenwald writes<\/a> that Ahmed\u2019s ordeal and other examples of Islamophobia are an almost inevitable result of 14 years of fear-mongering and\u00a0official harassment of Muslims, encouraged for political gain by U. S. politicians who have been waging wars against Islamic countries for three decades.<\/p>\n

At a town meeting in New Hampshire, the following exchange occurred<\/a> between Republican front-runner Donald Trump and a man in the audience.<\/p>\n