I know I should be writing about more topical current events such as Rice, Pistorius and Obama's announcement of the counter strike on Isis and 9/11. I guess I just feel like thousands of others are already writing, tweeting, Facebooking about that stuff. What do I have to say that's really so different?
-Rice needs helps no more punishment
-Pistorius got away with murder
-Obama has to strike back with military force or else his approval rating would hit rock bottom
There.
I remember where I was on 9/11. I was in my bed in the house in the Bronx where I grew up. I heard my mother and brother talking in the hall outside in shocked tones and then my mother cam in my room and told me to turn on the news. I couldn't believe what I was seeing and it took me a while to understand what was going on. The weather was perfect that day. Perfect, blue sky. Perfect. I was off from work that day and I remember opening the door and looking outside in disbelief of how calm it was, how peaceful in my Bronx neighborhood. But on the television, the towers were falling one by one. People were jumping to their deaths out of windows and there was a layer of toxic dust over everything within miles of the targeted site. It was truly surreal.
I cannot imagine what it was like to witness such a tragedy but I can't help feeling like the tragedies that followed were just as horrible and polarizing as the attack itself. Muslims and Black and Brown people with turbans were now looked at as terrorists, stopped in the streets, tortured beaten and killed, made to succumb to humiliating airport strip searches and put on no fly lists. I know a man who was thrown to the ground, beaten and threatened by a cop because he mistaked the pendant of Haile Selassie on his neck as Sadam Hussein. Yeah, that's what happens when you're black and have black friends. Those are the kind of stories you hear all the time. And post 9/11 everyone was suddenly either an American Patriot or an enemy of the state. It was scary. Freedom of speech and expression as promised by our constitution was a joke.
For these reasons, Bill Maher was fired from his show "Politically Incorrect" for suggesting that the men who flew their planes into the towers were heroes. I guess you can only be so "Politically Incorrect" until...
The whitest most middle American chicks ever, The Dixie Chicks were nearly burned at the stake through character defamation in response to lyrics protesting the Invasion of Iraq that followed. That's when I knew that I lived in a country that could at any moment turn into the America of the 1940s when Japanese Americans were put into interment camps after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
Black and Brown people born in America are not entitled to the same rights as Americans who identify as whites, never have been. We are not protected from tragedy, not compensated for it or supported by America while we are in it. This is why I cannot fault Obama for his decisions right now. He is not protected just because he is the President and he is certainly not supported. Black men and women have to do much of what they do just to stay alive and save face. The challenges and the daily internal struggle they experience internally as a result of racism for the most part, are of no interest to anyone in so far as addressing, finding solutions, having honest discussions and confronting the ugly truths that support the need for racism to thrive in America.
*sigh* Now I'm just depressing myself.
I don't want to come off as cold and unconcerned about the terrible tragedy of 9/11. There is no question that it has scarred this nation indelibly. But the tragedy has not yet ended nor did it begin with 9/11.
That's what I remember. That's what I know.
-Rice needs helps no more punishment
-Pistorius got away with murder
-Obama has to strike back with military force or else his approval rating would hit rock bottom
There.
I remember where I was on 9/11. I was in my bed in the house in the Bronx where I grew up. I heard my mother and brother talking in the hall outside in shocked tones and then my mother cam in my room and told me to turn on the news. I couldn't believe what I was seeing and it took me a while to understand what was going on. The weather was perfect that day. Perfect, blue sky. Perfect. I was off from work that day and I remember opening the door and looking outside in disbelief of how calm it was, how peaceful in my Bronx neighborhood. But on the television, the towers were falling one by one. People were jumping to their deaths out of windows and there was a layer of toxic dust over everything within miles of the targeted site. It was truly surreal.
I cannot imagine what it was like to witness such a tragedy but I can't help feeling like the tragedies that followed were just as horrible and polarizing as the attack itself. Muslims and Black and Brown people with turbans were now looked at as terrorists, stopped in the streets, tortured beaten and killed, made to succumb to humiliating airport strip searches and put on no fly lists. I know a man who was thrown to the ground, beaten and threatened by a cop because he mistaked the pendant of Haile Selassie on his neck as Sadam Hussein. Yeah, that's what happens when you're black and have black friends. Those are the kind of stories you hear all the time. And post 9/11 everyone was suddenly either an American Patriot or an enemy of the state. It was scary. Freedom of speech and expression as promised by our constitution was a joke.
For these reasons, Bill Maher was fired from his show "Politically Incorrect" for suggesting that the men who flew their planes into the towers were heroes. I guess you can only be so "Politically Incorrect" until...
The whitest most middle American chicks ever, The Dixie Chicks were nearly burned at the stake through character defamation in response to lyrics protesting the Invasion of Iraq that followed. That's when I knew that I lived in a country that could at any moment turn into the America of the 1940s when Japanese Americans were put into interment camps after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
Black and Brown people born in America are not entitled to the same rights as Americans who identify as whites, never have been. We are not protected from tragedy, not compensated for it or supported by America while we are in it. This is why I cannot fault Obama for his decisions right now. He is not protected just because he is the President and he is certainly not supported. Black men and women have to do much of what they do just to stay alive and save face. The challenges and the daily internal struggle they experience internally as a result of racism for the most part, are of no interest to anyone in so far as addressing, finding solutions, having honest discussions and confronting the ugly truths that support the need for racism to thrive in America.
*sigh* Now I'm just depressing myself.
I don't want to come off as cold and unconcerned about the terrible tragedy of 9/11. There is no question that it has scarred this nation indelibly. But the tragedy has not yet ended nor did it begin with 9/11.
That's what I remember. That's what I know.
1 comment:
I told my team today that 9-11 was probably the first time my family and I felt like we were American. Mainly because my cousin Keith was a fire fighter who died in the towers and because my big sister ran out of the twin towers crying, mascara streaked down her face, shoeless and mortified. She walked all the way home, from the twin towers to Co-op city in the Bronx. We were American because we lost a lot that day. But our American ness didn't last for long especially for me with my Arabic name.
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