The Irving Incident and Xenophobia

My Spidey sense is tingling again but, unlike Peter Parker, I know the source of my anxiety and agitation.

Regarding the Irving incident and the Mohamed family, some of my best experiences as a public school teacher were during my six and a half years as an Irving ISD English teacher. Within the Irving ISD, I learned more about the “politrix” of public school education than at any other time in my second career as Classroom teacher. Even so, what made life and making a living so promising in Irving, Texas was working with the ethnic diversity of students served within the district, the well-maintained city parks and recreation facilities, the corporate presence throughout the Irving/Las Colinas area and Cool River Café.

Other factors that made work life promising within the Irving ISD was that it was NOT the Dallas ISD!

As a former Dallas ISD English teacher, one of my morning “duties as assigned” under my teacher contract was metal detector duty. On a given morning, I stood and checked over 800 student’s backpacks and purses for contraband as each student passed through the metal detector portal stationed at the school’s main student entrance. I was loath to the duty. If I ever had occasion to be absent from work, my state personal days were taken on the particular day of the week that I was assigned metal detector duty. I will not lie.

Metal detector duty always felt like a violation of student’s constitutional rights to me and even if it wasn’t, I hated the invasion of student privacy, nonetheless. There’s nothing quite like “greeting” a student in the morning at the doors of the school house by putting him or her on the defensive with the presumption that Bront’ravius, Omar or Yadira might be carrying contraband within their My Little Pony backpacks.

As a teacher in the Irving ISD, I had no such duty.

The majority of my tenure as an English teacher was spent at The Academy of Irving ISD. The highly acclaimed T-STEM school is now known as Jack E. Singley Academy. U.S. News & World Report has ranked J.E.S.A as among the Top 100 high schools in the U.S. for years. When budget cuts eliminated my position as S.T.E.M teacher at The Academy, I was re-assigned by the district to MacArthur High School. I rejected the re-assignment to MacArthur High School because the principal there at the time had banned me from setting foot on the campus, when an accusation was made against me by two spiteful MacArthur High cheerleaders. The MacArthur principal decided to legitimize these two spiteful cheerleader’s loaded accusations, by sending a message to the administration at The Academy that I would be issued a citation if I ever set foot on MacArthur High School campus again; no football games, no baseball games, plays, musicals, art fair or any other student event on Mac’s campus: nothing!

Prior to that incident, I had never once met the MacArthur High School principal. Of course, I had heard of her reputation. Let it suffice it to say, that the woman had made a name for herself. When my own Academy high school administration called me in an unexpected meeting, after school hours, during my volunteer time at a Friday Night Tech student function, I was stunned to be informed of my ban from MacArthur High School by the principal. As stated previously, I had never even met the woman. I could not understand how she could assess my character against the two cheerleader’s accusations without even having met or spoken with me! When I initiated a meeting with my union attorney and the Irving ISD Personnel Director, the director took the position that the principal had the right to ban me from her campus if Mac’s principal perceived that there was a threat to any student’s safety. Sound familiar?

I felt demoralized as a man, as an ethnic Black male, a husband, a father of daughters but, more than anything else, I felt defeated as a CHRIST-follower. No doubt, Ahmed Mohammed felt the same sense of unfair treatment, in that he was totally mishandled and disrespected. The difference between Ahmed and me is that I was guilty of being an ethnic Black male English teacher.

Ahmed Mohamed was under suspicion because either (a) who Ahmed’s father happens to be in the Irving community (b) Ahmed’s family is Muslim (c) the climate of xenophobia perpetuated by the City of Irving or (d) all of the above. The clock had nothing to do with anything. When the Irving Police officer leaned back in his chair, glanced at Ahmed Mohammed and made the quip, something to the effect of “….yeap, that’s exactly who I thought it was.. that officer’s comment was a “slug” towards Mohammed’s family, as the teenager sat there detained at the Irving Police Department, without being permitted to consult with Ahmed’s parents!

Despite the accusation and my banning from the MacArthur High School campus, I was treated with the dignity of an ethical and competent teaching professional by The Academy administration and did my best to honor their trust by serving The Academy students well. During my tenure at The Academy, I had many good interactions with a freshman student named Ehyman. Ehyman explained to me that her father had once run for president of Sudan but had since relocated to Irving to re-establish his family roots as a new American citizen. Towards the end of the school year, Ehyman gifted me with a wooden chess set that she had received from the airline company during her international travels. She even wrote something nice to me inside the chess set box.

So, when I state publicly on Facebook and other social media that former student Ahmed Mohammed comes from a fine family, I know what I’m talking about! When I state publicly on Facebook and other social media that the electronic briefcase that housed former MacArthur High School student’s electronic clock is a briefcase that will be found on the campus of Jack E. Singley Academy’s engineering class, I KNOW what I’m talking about. A certain highly respected ex-merchant Marine, Academy Engineering teacher keeps any number of those same electronic briefcases in his Engineering classroom. And, guess what? His first name is “Sayad.”

So then, with all of that stated, let us GET A GRIP on our xenophobic accusation of the “creepy” ethnic Black male English teacher, whose own dark countenance dares to meet the eyes of his female students, during the course of interactions with said students. Let us GET A GRIP on our xenophobic reactions to brown-skinned students, whose families’ own religious worship and practices do not necessarily align themselves to our own distinctly MURIKAN expectations.

And, for that matter, let’s get a grip on our snarky, racist attitudes about any number of Latino citizens: a people who are most definitely NOT to be taken for third-rate, under class “peasants”, as one ethnic White guy called a young, respectable Latino man at the door of the local El Sombrero restaurant, earlier this week.

GET A GRIP!!!!