They handcuffed a black Muslim highschool student and perp-walked him out the school. They didn’t care to get the alleged explosive out of the building, or lock down the other students, but they took care to go through with this performance. In the picture of Ahmed handcuffed with the NASA shirt, the look in his eyes is devastating. Eyes seeing what authority and white Amerika will do to bright young people like him — people way smarter than me, people who have already achieved more than i have in half the years — when they dare to be publicly proud of their passion and accomplishments.
In Portland, black and brown kids as young as nine getting handcuffed, perp-walked, and taken to the station for ordinary school fights is a common occurrence. This never happens to white kids.
The school to prison pipeline in a way is a misnomer, implying schools themselves are not already prison environments. The education they offer is an indoctrination to treat all black and brown children as inherently criminal elements; childhood is not a factor to their existence. The handcuffs, the perp-walks, the humiliations. I cant even imagine what that was like, how damaging that would be. ive been harassed by the law in my day, when i had it coming do to naughty political activities, and those have left me quaking at my knees; what is it like to be a highschool teen, innocent, and the cops already think you are a threat. No miranda rights, no lawyer, no parents present during interrogation, which can happen because he was never formally charged, since the white community has already charged his existence as criminal.
This spectacle is not absurd, to say so is to let the rest of what Amerika has become off the hook. It’s meant to teach every white child what to think of these bodies, what the white grown-ups already think of these bodies every day. It’s meant to teach the brown and black kids that they are not here to learn or excel, that this is the punishment for doing so. They are here to be corralled, disciplined, subjugated, terrorized, and warehoused in one prison or the other. There is no future of intellectual achievement for them, not when our society needs unpaid brute labor in the prisons, and that’s not gonna be done by whites.
Bin Laden gave us a better education about ourselves than the public system ever has. The idea was not to start a holy war. Terror is a more subtle tactic. It was simply to create enough fear and instability to let us fall apart on our own; to exploit the reality that the land of the free and exceptional is in fact scared of its own shadow, that it sees hobgoblins in their soup — commies, gays, islamofascists, feminists.
Maybe Bin Laden was a fan of Nietzsche. The slaves, the mediocre, the weak: they have to cling to their unearned power. They are irascible, exploding in disproportionate fury at any reasoned criticism or perceived offence. They are enslaved to their own special snowflake sense of themselves. The weak fire teargas on nonviolent protesters. The weak sing frat songs about lynching. The weak stalk and dox online activists.The weak use students, children in their charge, as a supply of bodies to be punished for the stupidity of grownups.
White people built this country on the material basis of slavery. Psychologically they are enslaved because they have to keep running from their own internal truth: that they are false, weak, and cowards to the end.
It’s great to see the support for Ahmed, and it’d be great if he got a full ride to the top university of his choice and to see the teachers, administrators, and pigs fired or at least publicly ridiculed.
But my silver lining of this is the hope that more of the youth are getting radicalized against the small-minded paranoia and cop worship that holds them captive as their futures are robbed, and start doing what they can from within to collapse the system.
Ba Jin 