When news broke on Wednesday that a 14-year-old Muslim boy in Texas had been suspended from school and arrested based on bigoted assumptions, social media went crazy. Hashtags were created and more than a million tweets were posted. By day’s end President Barack Obama had invited the boy to the White House, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg said he’d love to meet him, Twitter had offered him an internship, and Google invited him to the company’s science fair.
The boy in question is Ahmed Mohamed, a ninth-grader at MacArthur High School in Irving, Texas, whose arrest and suspension this week sparked national debate over racial and religious profiling in America after teachers at his school mistook his homemade electronic clock for a bomb.
The self-described inventor had shared his invention with his engineering teacher, who had praised the project, but when the device beeped in his backpack during his English class, other teachers had a different reaction.
