🇺🇸Missing 9/12
As each year passes, every year on 9/11, I try harder and harder to avoid social media. Today, I came up to bed and following my normal routine, I checked FB. Big mistake. The first two posts I see reference 9/12 and how "we, as a nation, should remember and be like we were on 9/12". I literally saw my sleep pack a suitcase and head down the road looking back to wave bye.
Remembering 9/11 is hard, but now seeing people glorify and white-wash 9/12 is sending me a little over the edge.
Why do I avoid memories of 9/11? It is not because I don't want to remember all the families destroyed that day, all the brave men and women who risked their lives, or how, we as a country, came together. I want to remember that, all of it, but in remembering that, I have to also remember what else happened that day and the days after. If I'm honest, until today, as I write this, I have constantly blocked complete memory of that week. Even if it peeks up, I squash it down quickly. I unpacked a bulk of it tonight and it wasn't pretty. I was 22 years old, a year out of college, working my first professional job in downtown Baltimore for a large financial company. I had been facilitating a meeting, so knew nothing of what was happening until I came out of the meeting. Everyone was in a state of shock. I saw a small TV set up in a kitchen and it showed the second plane flying into the second tower. Even as my young mind was processing what was happening, my manager came to me and took me to the side. He looked at me intently and asked where I had parked that day. I told him I was parked a block up the street from the office (versus my normal garage that was 6 blocks away). He said, "Good. You are going to get into trouble today, if you stick around. Thank God your hair is up. Get your stuff and leave...now." I heard his tone but remember thinking "Oh God, he thinks there are more planes coming for Baltimore. He is scared and protecting us."
I didn't question him, just nodded and went to get my stuff. My colleagues at the time asked what he had wanted. I told them what he said, and they all reacted very negatively. They said he was being a prick and a jerk, and trying to scare me and I was too young to understand how racist he was. To them, he was being racist, because he looked at me and saw my coloring and that I was a Muslim. They thought he was wrong to connect those dots in that moment. Today, I still can't unpack his motives, but I want to believe he genuinely cared and connected dots the rest of the nation would be connecting over the next 24 hours. At that time, though, it was too much to decipher, so as the announcements began for early closure, I got my stuff and left. We still had cell service so I called my dad and asked him to tell me the backroads out of Baltimore City since he knew them like the back of his hands. Jones Falls was a parking lot, so for the next 45 minutes, my dad talked me through alleyways, backroads, roads that weren't even roads, until I got to Reisterstown Road, where traffic opened up enough to get me home to Owings Mills. The rest of the afternoon was spent waiting for all our local family to congregate at our place. Then we spent the evening watching news pour in: who did it, why, who were they, all of it, and a weird pit formed in my stomach as the night wore on. The next day, my dad refused to let me go to work. I called my manager, who said stay home for the week. I was too young and naive to understand what my dad, my mom, and my manager already understood. Life as an American, as I had known it for 22 years, was no longer the truth.
Growing up my parents never downplayed racism and how much they faced it every day. My father was a neurologist and my mom worked as a Bookkeeper and later as a Bank Teller. The stories my mom would tell of how her customers treated her were eye-opening. Every day they were called a "foreigner". It was their identity. At the same time though, they taught us to be true to ourselves and what our heritage is, because "that is the only way respect will be earned in the white world." I remember my dad saying once: "all it takes is you bending your knee one time, they won't stop until they have you on all fours." Despite this, they would always teach us to be humble and ALWAYS smile. Humble, because that is what Islam teaches us. Being humble neutralizes the ego. Racism and discrimination can't exist where there is no ego. And smile, because "its Sunnah and we are in a place where our smiles can open hearts and our frowns can close doors". Ahh...the lovely advice of 1st generation immigrants trying to balance their American dream with reality.
That Friday, after 9/11, my dad didn't let me wear traditional clothes outside the house. For the past 15 years I had been raised to wear traditional clothes on Friday. I came home from school, changed, and the rest of the evening was spent running errands with my dad...all in traditional clothes. From that week on my dad highly suggested I change into jeans, etc anytime I went out. It wouldn't be until I was pregnant 3 years later, when he was hospitalized, that I went back to comfortably wearing traditional clothes in a general public setting. The same week he went to the mosque, but didn't let me go with him. He came back telling of people lined up yelling cuss words and blocking the way into the mosque. That weekend we had guests. It was a family who were good friends of ours. He had been in the Pentagon in the part of the building where the plane crashed. He and a group of colleagues were heading to a meeting when he and another lady remembered he forgot his notebook and she forgot her pen. They had turned around and walked away from the spot where 3 minutes later the plane crashed, in front of them, as they were rushing to catch up with their team. Their entire team died in that crash. He and the lady with him were showered with debris from the crash site. This same couple told my parents, how, after walking for 6 hours to get home, the next morning he faced a mob egging their house and car. Why? Because the gentleman I'm talking about is a Muslim American who had lived in the same community for 15 years, and worked at the Pentagon for about the same time. But post-9/11, it didn't matter. To his neighbors his identity was reduced to: he is a Muslim. That couple and their 2 young kids (at the time 10 and 13) stayed locked in their house for days.
There was no social media back then, so no one heard of the families that moved into hotel rooms to avoid having their kids experience this aftermath. No one heard that Muslim kids were bullied and called terrorists, even though many were too young to even know what that means. No one remembers a Sikh man beaten to death in Arizona 4 days after 9/11 by a person who reportedly told friends that he was "going to go out and shoot some towel-heads" because people couldn't tell the difference between Sikh and Muslim. The list goes on. Today I ask: How many of you associate this reality to 9/12 and beyond?
Because of the violence that poured into the streets on 9/12, I stopped hanging the name of God in my windshield or having any stickers on my car, that would make me identifiable as a Muslim. I went back to work, but never wore my hair down on my way to and from work anymore. This stopped only after I started wearing a hijab in 2008. You see, at the time of 9/11, I didn't wear hijab. I dressed like any other 22 year old professional, with black hair down to my waist that I liked to leave open. My manager knew that on that fated day my dark hair and Arabesque look was enough to have me targeted. Whatever his reason, I will forever be grateful for his actions that day. In a city full of panic, who I was had been dwindled down to how I looked. When we all returned to work he apologized if I thought I was making it all about my race. I didn't, but his apology made me recognize one thing: 9/11 damaged my identity of being an American. The weeks, months and years that followed all gave proof to this statement. From people jeering at my last name, asking me questions about how I would be stoned back home...you name it I've heard it. Even then, living in Maryland, to this day, I count my blessings because I know there were, and still are, other areas of America where the hatred and vitriol was much worse. That day, and forward, no matter where it was or by whom, Muslims, me included, were given a public identity: Terrorist. Not American. So when today, I see a post of a picture that says "I miss 9/12" or we should be like we were on 9/12 because that is the day "People were American, before they were Jewish or Christian, Republican or Democrat" I hurt deep inside. While I can normally breeze over statements like this I couldn't let this one go. The purposeful omission is a stark reminder, that even today, Muslims are not a part of the 9/11 narrative as anything but terrorists. On 9/12, while America was reeling, there were Muslims locked up at home too scared to come out because this land, and it's people, had just turned against them.
Today, people say hatred started with Trump. I beg to differ. Hatred started on 9/12, long before social media, and things going viral. The ramifications of the virus that started to spread that day are what we are experiencing today. Ask any Muslim 40 years or older. We have the best before and after recollections. We will tell you how it feels to be American from the day you are born, but then have one day become the cause for questioning your identity, your being, and ultimately requiring you to spend the next 18 years defending and proving you have a right to be called American. I will never forget the people who were murdered that day, or the first responders, and all others impacted by 9/11. I WILL remember 9/11, because that was the day, no matter who you were, what race, religion, color, it did not matter. Human beings were helping human beings. Human beings were grieving over loss of human beings. That is the day I look to remember what we are all capable of as Americans.
I WILL NOT commemorate beyond that.
I will not remember what forced me to learn to battle hatred and how to defend my birthright to say "I AM American".
