Jacoby wrote:
Admit it, it looks like a bomb. ...
First, how would YOU know what a "real bomb" looks like? How many have you made?
In the Navy, we received training in how to spot IEDs. Essentially, it all came down to any ordinary object in a place where you would not normally find it ... a suitcase sitting upright by the side of a freeway ... a pressure cooker along a parade route ... a piece of pipe in the back seat of a car ... a box truck parked on the lawn next to a building ...
What I see in that video is a kid's school project, like the dozens I saw and built for science and engineering classes during high school and university. The only reason it looked like a bomb to some light-skinned people is because
it was a technical device in the possession of a brown-skinned, Arabic-speaking, Muslim boy.
I have openly carried similar-looking devices around toll plazas, freeway ramps, parking structures, airports, and other public transportation facilities, and no one asked me what I was doing, why I was there, or what it was that I was holding -
maybe because I seem to be nothing more than a white man of late middle age going about his business!Racism seems to have a lot more to do with identifying a brown-skinned Muslim kid's science project as a "bomb" than any ignorant opinion on what a "real bomb" looks like.