LogFAQs > #885395545

Like Ahmed Mohamed, the 14-year-old teenager from Irving, Texas arrested for bringing a clock to school, I grew up Sudanese and Muslim in America, though of a different generation. My family moved to the United States from Khartoum in 1990, when I was 12 years old. In the mid ‘90s, when I attended high school in New York, bringing a home-made clock to school would not have resulted in arrest. Muslims were treated as backward, though rarely dangerous.

Ahmed Mohamed lives in a different time. It wasn’t long after his arrest that social media began debating who he is and what impact his identity had on what transpired. For the most part, news reports referred to him as “a Muslim boy,” his own family emphasizing his religious identity as the reason why, in Ahmed’s words, he was made to feel like “a terrorist.”

Meanwhile, on twitter, black Muslims used the hashtag #beingblackandmuslim to discuss Ahmed’s case and their experiences. Others wondered what would have happened if he was black. Others still called for his blackness not to be ignored. Africa is a country, an influential cultural blog, waded in with a tweet. Even the Washington Post ran an article on the subject.

I have no idea how Ahmed and the rest of his family identify beyond this specific incident. What I do know is how America perceives someone that looks like him and carries his name. The “is it because he is Muslim? Black? Both?” question is an interesting one to ponder, but practically, not an easy one to answer.

Ahmed’s case is a classic example of intersectionality — a term coined by law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw in the 1980s. Building on the work of others before her, Crenshaw grappled with a specific problem: why had women of color been left, in her words, “invisible in plain sight” by both feminist and anti-racist movements? The conclusion she reached was that “the kind of discrimination people have conceptualized is limited because they stop their thinking when the discrimination encounters another kind of discrimination”. In a passage from a 1989 essay that has since become famous, Crenshaw writes:

Consider an analogy to traffic in an intersection, coming and going in all four directions. Discrimination, like traffic through an intersection, may flow in one direction, and it may flow in another. If an accident happens in an intersection, it can be caused by cars traveling from any number of directions and, sometimes, from all of them. Similarly, if a Black woman is harmed because she is in the intersection, her injury could result from sex discrimination or race discrimination...But it is not always easy to reconstruct an accident: Sometimes the skid marks and the injuries simply indicate that they occurred simultaneously, frustrating efforts to determine which driver caused the harm.
Taking this analogy and applying it to Ahmed, we find him standing at a dangerous intersection in modern America: Islamophobia meets white supremacy. Black Muslims face, at the very least, a double discrimination in the United States. In the years immediately following 9/11, my sisters and I used to say only half-jokingly that we felt “black in the street, Muslim at the airport.” If we had been veiled, we would have felt Muslim on the street as well.
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I am Kely.
http://i.imgur.com/bjGE3Tc.jpg