On 9/11 I'm reminded that America has a selective amnesia problem

 

20 years ago today, I was laying in my bed, leisurely getting ready for my day.  It was the first semester of my doctoral program.  It was almost four months since my father had died.  It was the one of the rare times I didn't need to be on campus immediately after my shower.  I was not anticipating a phone call from anyone but definitely not my younger brother who called to ask if I was watching television.  I was but I'm sure I was watching the Cartoon Network or something equally benign so I was not seeing what he was seeing.  As he told me that he initially thought a movie had gone off kilter but one of the towers was crumbling, we saw the second tower get hit.

  We were both silent for a while before we both realized a lot had changed and we were not entirely sure as to why.  We told each other that we loved each other, said we needed to be safe, and hung up.  I nearly flew to my office on campus and my counseling psychology department prepared for upset and distressed students to show up in the clinic or in our classes.  We tried to tend to each other simultaneously but we were braced for what the students would need from us.  Turns out, they didn't need a whole lot for weeks.  They didn't know what happened in many cases until we told them and then were worried about things like would we be targets in our small Midwestern town.  A few were worried about relatives in New York that no one had heard from but in general they were pretty chill--for a while.  Weeks of watching the towers fall eventually did lead to some anger and frustrations that I spoke about repeatedly and what I figured out was how much they didn't know about why anyone would want to attack us.  I wasn't sure if I knew because I was just enough older than then, or because my father had been in the military or because I didn't have the protection of being white as I moved through the world but I'll admit to being shocked in a different way that they were.

Turns out they hadn't had the same kind of history lessons I had in school.  Either because of location, or because my K-12 instructors were much more eff the patriarchy than I gave them credit for at the time,or because my father was former military but I knew things they just didn't understand about how America was viewed by the rest of the world.  In classes where I had immigrant or diverse students they eagerly added commentary, but overall my students just knew that we were beloved across the globe because we always brought freedom to people.  They hadn't heard what it took to achieve freedom or about the countries that needed our intervention but never got it or didn't want our intervention but couldn't get rid of us.  9/11 was their first understanding that the world writ large was not our biggest fan.  That moment made me reflect on all of the things you have to forget about to blindly love America.  Forget or never be taught but either way there was a chunk that had to be erased from the collective memory.  

I'm not sure why anyone really let me keep teaching in my doctoral program because I wasn't deliberately but I was continually messing with that collective memory.  During a different class we talked about accurate portrayals of minoritized communities in media and settled in on a film that I really was upfront about making me angry.  It was Rosewood about a Black town that is decimated by angry white townspeople in the neighboring city based on what most people knew up front was a lie.  We had a little bit of a gap in the schedule so they begged to watch it and I gave in.  I graded while they watched and got angry.  It was a long week with at least one walking out and not returning until the next week when we began processing the film.  A few things became crystal clear to them:

• Sometimes people sucked for no good reason
• Blind hatred based on race was irrational at best but dangerous at worst
• People quickly turned on other people that had taken care of them for ages because they felt empowered to do so
• Rosewood wasn't as long ago as they thought it would be, the film is a dramatization of course but it was based on the real slaughter in Rosewood, Florida in 1923.  The people in the film could have been their grandparents or great grandparents.
• They had never heard about Rosewood or Tulsa or any of the other race riots
  

That last two points were the one they struggled with the most. This wasn't some far removed time frame like they had been taught about slavery, sharecropping, Jim Crow and the like.  It was closer to the Civil Rights movement and living people in their families than they could wrap their heads around and they were pissed.  They were also left wondering what else they had never heard about when it came to what American history was really shaped around.  I left crumbs for different things, Trail of Tears and Juneteenth and psychology diagnosing homosexuality, but that wasn't the focus of the class and I couldn't veer too far afield and still give them what they had paid for.  I taught those kids during and in the years after 9/11.  I have taught many since then and that knowledge gap is ever present.  

Present and expanding if I want to be honest.  There's room to be forgiven for not knowing about something that happened in 1923 but they don't know about all of the George Floyd's that happened prior to last summer.  They don't actually know about sporting events without the National Anthem being compulsary for the players on the field--that was a post 9/11 thing too.  They don't know about redlining, covenants in property deeds, discriminatory practices in lending, why Black GIs never benefited from the plan the way their white compatriots did, that it was once illegal for people from different racial groups to marry, the fear and isolation of the early days of the AIDS epidemic, why PRIDE marches are not the same thing as what happened in Charlottesville, why no immigrant documented or otherwise is here to steal their jobs and futures, why Blackface is still problematic (see dressing up like Native Americans, people from Asia, and other such trappings without a need or doing unfortunate things like recasting all Black plays with all white casts) and a host of other things.  I can't blame them entirely--they are young.  People are actively choosing to not let them know the full picture of this country.  To be clear, I don't want people to be ashamed of being American which is what people argue will happen if we teach everything.  I want them to appreciate how far we have come and understand how much further we still have to go.  The folks refusing the education or just thinking we are magically post racial because we live in a country that elected Barack Obama while wondering where he was on 9/11 because he sure as hell wasn't at the White House doing his job.  No lie people say this.  Look it up I'm not linking to it.

Those things that may help us prevent another 9/11 are overlooked in favor of religious freedom and Christian nation and the wonder and amazement that is white America.  We overlook Manifest Destiny and the devastation that was visited on First Nations tribes.  Or the internment camps after Pearl Harbor and we gloss over slavery as being so long ago no one is understanding why Juneteenth needed to be a federal holiday.  On that point I agree with them.  Don't appreciate it still but that's already been spoken on.  Don't get me wrong.  I'm not saying this problem is uniquely American but we can't need to remember 9/11 and hold on to statues from confederate soldiers if we are going to repeatedly forget the havoc that was wrought from trickle down economics, the attack on welfare queens, the war on drugs, stop and frisk and a pantheon of other ills.  If we are really going to be perpetually forgetful, then it may have been easier to have left the field and railroad workers where they were and grown your own crops and figured out how to get your steel engines moving on your own.  So yes remember 9/11 and everything else I've mentioned while also remembering we are in the middle of repeating the flu pandemic and we only got through it because we quit worrying about individual freedoms and started worrying about seeing a new generation of folks develop amnesia.