A Bo(d)y with a Clock

Even though nearly three months have passed since Ahmed Mohamed brought his clock to school, he continues to make headlines, forcing us to remember our collective fascination and rage that surrounded his case. We watched with horror as the fourteen-year-old was escorted out of his school in handcuffs by five Irving officers, then witnessed social media’s reaction to his detainment; cries from family, friends, and strangers rallying together on Twitter. Over the course of a week, the boy-with-a-clock secured visits to the White House, interviews with MIT and a trip to NASA. The last image of Mohamed that I saw on Reddit and Twitter shows the boy standing beside a large table of gifted Microsoft products. A happy ending, it seemed, to a tragic case. Now, Mohamed is back in the news. His family and their legal team are threating to file a civil lawsuit against both the city of Irving and the school district if a sum of fifteen million dollars for damages and a formal apology from officials is not paid to the boy and his family.

I want to clarify my position here: I am not concerned with the ample amount of social media attention that Mohamed received during and after his detainment, nor will I claim that this latest legal move by Mohamed’s family is warranted or, as more conservative readers maintain, an example of blackmail. Rather, I want to return to and then refocus our attention back on the particulars of the boy’s apprehension and isolation while in police custody. Handcuffed and surrounded by five Irving officers while being led out of his school, Mohamed became something other than a boy with a clock; Mohamed, no longer a child, Muslim, or student, became a body charged with a crime. This transition from boy to isolated criminal, processed, and detained with frightening efficiency points us toward a more insidious process — one where we, too, could efficiently and quickly become abstracted and be defined as criminal bodies.

Upon arrest, the boy-with-a-clock transitioned from a fourteen-year-old student to that of a criminal in a detention center, stripping him of all signifiers of his identity. After being led out of school, Mohamed maintains that he was detained without the ability to call his parents and without legal representation. Even though he was a minor, the process was never explained to him, nor was he allowed to have his legal guardians help mediate his arrest. Here no longer a specific child in handcuffs, Mohamed was treated as any other criminal threat. Similarly, Mohamed’s father also asserts that he was denied the opportunity to speak with his son immediately after arriving at the Irving station, stating that the first time he saw his son that day Ahmed was “surrounded by five police and was handcuffed.” Mr. Mohamed claims when he did ask to see his son, the officers refused “because they [the officers] were taking his fingerprints and asking him questions.” The boy-turned-criminal was left isolated.

What shocks me here are the tactics of the Irving officers. Their spectacle of arrest and alleged denial of representation, parental or legal, during questioning highlights Mohamed’s fragile position between youth under suspicion and criminal body under control of a police force. The two identifying categories are conflated, made indistinguishable. Here Mohamed is represented less like a fourteen year old boy and student, and more like a seized body stuck in limbo, subjected to criminal processing without the rights we would assume a teenaged boy would receive.

We see a similar process happening again in the rhetoric that surrounded Mohamed’s case and arrest. Acting as spokesperson for the Irving Police Department, Officer James McLellan addresses Mohamed in a manner that stripes the boy of any specific characteristics. Falling back on abstraction in his statement to WFAA, McLellan refuses to use Mohamed’s name, instead opting for the more generalized “the juvenile.” Taken with the spectacle of Mohamed’s arrest and detainment, the rhetorical move completed after the fact highlights the category in which Mohamed was forced to inhabit — the abstracted juvenile who is now facing charges for constructing a hoax bomb. Here Mohamed’s race, religious beliefs, citizenship, and specified age are lost and what replaces them is the bare representation of a body breaking the law. No longer safely represented as purely Ahmed Mohamed, the boy-with-a-clock is, at least in McLealln’s rhetoric, conflated with a criminal abstraction.

How can a boy be treated like this and how can such an erasure of personality and identity happen? The answer seems to lie in the confusion of police duty and service to the nation. As Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben maintains, politics were concerned with the outsider; the goal of politics focused on defending the state from external and internal enemies. Police were then employed to maintain the health and safety of the people inhabiting the state, concerning themselves with the individuals of the nation. Mohamed’s treatment signifies that there is no longer a difference between these two national bodies. Police are no longer recognizing and seeking the safety of individuals, but rather the entire health of the national body, fighting now internal and external enemies of the state. To do so adequately and efficiently, they can no longer deal with individuals, but rather must do the political work of abstracting the external and internal enemies of the nation.

Because of this shift in duty, Mohamed, at least to the Irving officers, is no longer an individual, a student, Muslim, or a minor, but rather is easily viewed as an abstracted danger to the nation state. He is a criminal, an internal enemy that threatens security of the state and its citizens. The qualities that made up his individual personhood no longer matter directly to his identity as a criminal and are then, as a result, stripped away. In terms of the police’s tactics such treatment is for the betterment of the nation’s health. The tactics that the Irving officers resorted to were not necessarily byproducts of racism and individual bigotry, but rather a demonstration of their allegiance to securing the health of the state, a display of their highly efficient policing process.

I am not ultimately arguing here that the officers who detained Mohamed are inherently evil, or entirely innocent. Rather, I want to refocus our viewing of the event, maintaining that Mohamed’s arrest and detainment highlights a process that could easily happen to any offender. If a teenaged boy is able to have his identity stripped from him, to be treated and detained not as an child, but rather as an abstract criminal, then what about an adult offender? Unnerving to me in Mohamed’s case, is its ability to highlight the power of the judicial process to quickly change a person-who-commits-a-crime into a criminal. This criminal identity seems completely devoid of the qualities and rights we typically associate with citizenship. If Mohamed’s case is typical, then we are all potentially subject to this system’s power; becoming a singular person who is able to evolve into an abstracted collective body removed from the ordinary citizenship. What worries me about this case is its ability to support the claim that we are able to quickly, like Ahmed Mohamed, become criminals-with-a-clock.