No doubt because of zero tolerance.
I heard a great talk this spring about subconscious racism. Few people are openly racist anymore and most people would report NOT being racist. But, due to whatever factors, we all still hold prejudices. The problem arises when part of that prejudging is feeling scared/nervous/threatened when faced with a person who looks a certain way. It's why a white guy can walk around with open carry and we think, "Oh, he's just a gun enthusiast," and a black guy with open carry is reason to call the cops.
I'm going to guess that most of us have never had a violent interaction with a non-white, but when we see rioting on TV we think, "Oh, they're violent," rather than they might be justifiably protesting injustice in our society.
I'm not washing my hands of this at all. Growing up, going through a store, I was touching everything in the aisle. My mom turned and yelled at me, "Put your hands down; you look like a Puerto Rican." I had no idea what that meant, but I knew it was bad. My mom comes from a bilingual family and her dad was an immigrant from a South American country, but I sure as hell didn't want to be Puerto Rican, because they are bad. It takes a long time to work things we were taught out of our heads.
Think about it- most of us have seen Back to the Future. The bad guy at the beginning looks like this:
and the guy driving the van has a head covering. It was the 80s- the Libyan terrorists were blowing up planes and we were breaking foreign relations with them. They WERE the bad guy. The early 90s feature the first Gulf War. September 11, 2001. The second Gulf War. On and on.
Basically, what I'm trying to boil down is, we have a entire generation that has been raised to think people who look Middle Eastern are bad guys. It's in the background of our minds.
This kid is fighting background racism that most people don't even realize they posses.
