Sorry, but you're 100% incorrect there. Just because the majority within a certain demographic "believe" something does not make it so.
What matters is whether or not the reason, evidence, and methodology are correct and capable of being reproduced. Much like math, 2 + 2 = 4 regardless of any sentient input. As such the truth of these matters remains based in reason and evidence despite what any majority of people might believe.
Do you know the extent to which most people in opposition to my proposals have done research? How much research have you yourself done on this topic as well?
I'm not going to call people who draw conclusions about controversial incidents without any hesitation reasonable. To operate in a reasonable manner (especially about incidents so charged as this one) we need to reserve judgment until acquiring more facts surrounding the incident. Making a hasty call to judgment does not to me preclude a respect for reason but instead a thirst for populism.
That the majority of a demographic believe something does not necessarily make it true, I agree. However, let's not jump to accusations of populism. People's beliefs of Islamophobia and racism are not just dictated to them by authority figures or the media. People are able to experience the culture and the community and the media of the United States, depending on where they live, and are able to come to their own conclusions. What a majority of people believe doesn't have to be justified, but in this case I don't see how you could say a majority opinion isn't justified since, generally speaking, we're endowed with the same intellectual tools as you and I are and I don't think there's sufficient reason to believe that people accept the existence of Islamophobia and its impact on Ahmed's incident as a matter of creed and without reason.
By the same token, it would be inconsistent for me to call somebody who points to mere examples as disproving the extent of Islamophobia in the United States as being reasonable. To operate in a reasonable manner, we have to put our examples and evidence into context. I say again, the mere existence of white people who have had to go through the same ordeal as Ahmed does not minimize the extent of Islamophobia in the US nor does it preclude the possibility that Islamophobia affected how Ahmed was treated. This would be similar to saying that in a case where a black man is shot by the police, race had nothing to do with it, because there are many examples of white men who are shot by police. That is to say, your evidence does not justify your conclusion.
So you have a better criteria for what would be representative then?
Of course. The example in the last post, taking a representative sample of how the same incident affects both white and Muslim kids would be a start, as well as taking into account that even that kind of evidence does not address all of the incidents that aren't reported. What if equal numbers of white and Muslim kids get detained, but fewer Muslim kids are bringing clocks to school in the first place? My point is that evidence without context is poor evidence, and the absence of other evidence does not make poor evidence better.
I mean, look, here's the deal. You're saying it's unfair (not an argument btw) that because I'm willing to show examples of white people being punished for far more benign behavior that it disproves race as a factor. You say that this isn't an empirical approach when you are instead doing the exact opposite of what you claim would be fair.
Saying that your argument is unfair is definitely an argument. That's my conclusion, and I give reasons to support that. So it's an argument. Examples of white people being punished for far more benign behaviour does not disprove race as a factor. Hell, by the same token I might as well say race is not a factor in the poverty of blacks, since there are white people living in worse conditions of poverty than most poor blacks. Neither is genetics a factor in the height of human beings, since there examples of tall parents with short children, even shorter than the children of some short parents in fact, which disproves that as well. Neither will eating a box of cookies a week contribute to weight gain, since here's Jenny who does that but, hey, she hasn't gained a pound in ten years. I hope that I have demonstrated the fact that counterexamples to a proposition exist does not disprove that proposition - and to claim that they would disprove the proposition would therefore be poor logic and unfair. Those counterexamples must be put in context in the big picture in order to have meaning.
So lemme break it down for you.
Just because ONE student who happens to be Muslim brings in a device that school officials and police would have categorized as looking suspicious regardless of the owners race gets detained within the full rights of power delegated to the school system does not mean that there is a pandemic of Islamophobia in the US.
Nobody in this thread is talking about a pandemic of Islamophobia in the US. That's a highly sensationalist way of putting it. And besides, your original argument was:
The ENTIRE point of what I've been saying up until now is that not only "might" a white student in this situation have gotten expelled/arrested, it's a certainty they would have.
... or that a white student in Ahmed's position
certainly would have been treated the same way. If any white student would be treated the same way as Ahmed in his same position, then race would not be a factor, since everybody is being treated the same. So that's what you've been arguing, and let's not move the goalposts (unless you wish to, but be explicit about it).
So to draw the conclusion that one incident justifies the conclusion that he was treated differently merely because of his background in the face of evidence that states the opposite in vastly overwhelming numbers which is applied to similar settings, with similar punishments AND less intensity behind them runs counter to the point you're trying to make. It means the overarching trend operates opposite to what you claim. So coming up with a hypothetical situation to prove your conclusions correct when the evidence already exists to prove the opposite means you're either horribly misunderstanding the situation (It's wildly anti-empirical) or you're dishonest. I'm convinced it's the former.
The conclusion is not drawn on the basis that this one incident happened. It's drawn because of how Islam, and perceptions of Islam are depicted in the media. It's drawn because some people in the United States are genuinely afraid of Sharia law overturning the American legal system. It's drawn because anti-Islamic hate crimes are up since 2001, even though the number of annual hate crimes as a whole have come down since 2001. It's in this context that I conclude that if it were a white kid instead of Ahmed, everybody would have given less of a damn.
You give your counterexamples, which apparently exist in vastly overwhelming numbers, without addressing the social context in which we live at all. The hypothetical isn't supposed to prove something 100%. Instead, it's a thought experiment that provides to support to what I'm trying to say. Nobody can prove 100% whether or whether not race had something to do with it, because nobody can enter the minds of the people involved in the incident as it was happening. Maybe the school staff suffered a collective fit of momentary insanity but nobody would ever know.
However, I believe that it is beyond a reasonable doubt that Islamophobia had something to do with this incident. The association between Islam and terrorism is real. They didn't treat the incident as a bomb threat, yet they suspended Ahmed even after the incident was over. You talk as if your examples preclude the impact Islamophobia had on this incident, but that's simply not a logical connection, as I've already described above.
Absolutely, there is a perception that those who are in the Islam is tied to heightened incidents of terrorism.
Is it unjustified? Not exactly, at least for the time being. (Groups with high social conflict facing what they perceive to be asymmetric powers often resort to covert actions such as terrorism or sabotage. I.E. Ireland vs the UK, Sri Lanka vs India, and various nations populated predominantly by Muslims suffering effects from US Foreign Policy)
But the tragic point of focus about this reality is that the overwhelming majority of people killed by terrorism rooted in Islam are... other Muslims.
I will say this as far as generalizations go. There's gonna be discrimination against pretty much everyone for almost any reason you can imagine. Yes, some Muslims in the US (And elsewhere) will face some form of upset over their beliefs, but those cases are the outliers. Because how many people do they encounter who bear no negativity towards them for these traits vs the ones who might act cruelly towards them? I think the answer is pretty obvious given how well adjusted and functioning most Muslims manage to be in society.
That political Islam uses terrorism does not mean Mohammed living in suburban Anyville subscribes to terrorist thought and advocates for terrorist action. The religion of Islam is tied to terrorism in its political expression, but that doesn't justify treating somebody who most likely lives outside of that kind of context as if they were a bomb threat.
In conclusion, like Keiran said, a couple of white people being punished for doing something does not disprove the overarching trend of Islamophobia nor does it disprove the impact of Islamophobia on this one event. Given everything that we know about the public perception of Islam and Muslims, I think it is much more reasonable to believe that the incident was racially charged. Any conclusion we draw based on the incident cannot ignore these salient factors.
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