Ahmed Mohamed is a human Rorschach test. Look at that face and tell me what you see: Muslim-American? African-American? I myself see something very familiar: Nerd-American.

Mohamed, a 14-year-old high-school freshman in Texas and the son of an immigrant family from Sudan, is a cause célèbre just at the moment because he was handcuffed, frog-marched out of a classroom, and arrested for the crime of showing off his technological chops by building an electronic clock and bringing it to school to show his engineering teacher. (Let us now praise MacArthur High School in Irving, Texas, for the fact that 14-year-olds there have engineering teachers.) Apparently, an English teacher — it had to be an English teacher — thought the device looked like a bomb.

It didn’t. But it looked a hell of a lot more like a bomb than that half-eaten Pop-Tart in the possession of that seven-year-old in Maryland looked like a gun, yet the child was suspended; it was surely more reasonable to think that those circuit boards constituted a bomb than to think that the bang-bang! hand gesture of a ten-year-old in Milford, Mass., constituted a serious threat to shoot somebody; taking a high-school kid into custody after a teacher reports a possible bomb threat is surely no more irrational than arresting an eighth-grader over an NRA T-shirt.