Early on a Tuesday morning 20 years ago, during American history class in the opening week of eighth grade, the first of two planes slammed into the World Trade Center. Our class heard a loud explosion and stopped immediately to gather at the window, gaping at the fireball engulfing the tallest buildings in America.
That morning I had woken up to my alarm clock playing Ginuwine’s “Differences” on Hot 97. I biked from my family home in an office building on Fulton and Nassau to my middle school on Warren St. and West Side Highway with the wistful words, “My whole life has changed” on repeat in my head. The cool early morning breeze of the fall day rippled my shirt. In the sixth and seventh grades, I had walked to school with my dad and my sister, whose elementary school was in the same building. That year I began riding my bike by myself, affording me a new sense of freedom and independence that I regarded cautiously, like a present I wasn’t sure was really mine.
After the second plane hit, my mom came to pick my sister and me up at our school. As we evacuated along the West Side Highway, I watched people jump out of the towers to avoid burning alive, their silhouettes falling interminably against the deep blue sky. I remember my teacher telling me to “Look away, look away!” But my gaze was transfixed on the bodies and the crumbling concrete, and as the second tower collapsed, I felt the center of my world buckling. I didn’t feel sadness, or anger, or fear. I just felt shock. I was suddenly submerged in a reality I couldn’t fully comprehend.
My family spent the following days at my grandparents’ house in New Jersey, and I became an obsessive consumer of the news. I watched every report and read every article for any updates, or glimpses of our block, our building, or nearby landmarks. The Borders bookstore. Mrs. Field’s cookies on the corner. J&R across the street. The Chase bank at the end of the block. I looked for information that would allow me to comprehend this incredible act of violence, but I remember feeling numb, yet sitting alone on the side of a road and forcing myself to cry.“My whole life has changed.”
I used to walk through the World Trade Center every day on the way to school, and get a Krispy Kreme doughnut for 85 cents. The buildings were the physical background to my childhood, and a fixture in my imagination. They had always been there, and I had always walked through them, touched their walls, felt the cold air conditioning of the Winter Garden on a hot summer day and relaxed on the steps, observing the tourists, the palm trees, and the huge glass windows. I felt the rug had been pulled out from under me, the veracity of my existence undermined. What other seemingly permanent structures could tumble down at any second? When I went with my mom to visit our apartment covered in dust to evacuate my parakeet, Pepper, I found that I was often more closely informed about what was happening in lower Manhattan than the writers of some of the articles I was reading. This gave me a sense of the power of first-hand information, and was the start of my addiction to breaking news.
As the weeks grew into months and the fires continued to burn, Ground Zero became a tourist attraction. People flocked from all around the country and the world to glimpse the buildings’ burning skeletons, while George W. Bush launched a murderous war 6700 miles away. I felt like yelling “This is my home!” at the tourists, or putting up signs on the chain-link fences at the site’s perimeter pointing out that gawking commodifies a tragedy. I did neither. But more perverse than tourists at a gaping wound was the posturing of power-hungry politicians. So many, especially those from outside of New York, whose lives were untouched, sought influence through lies about Muslims, terrorism and safety. As they advocated for and cheered on wars that devastated Afghanistan, then Iraq, and later Sudan, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, and more. As they did this, they made life exponentially more dangerous for Muslims and people of color within the U.S.
Seeing everything up close opened my 13-year-old eyes to how much of politics is staged for private agendas. Bush sent the National Guard to lower Manhattan, but the attack had already happened. There wasn’t more crime in the area, or more attacks being plotted, so what were they here to do? They were here to create an image of strength and control. Instead of identifying the planners of the attack and bringing them to justice, the U.S. took down a government and ripped apart multiple countries. Hate crimes spiked all over the country, and have intensified since. Everybody seemed to take from this disaster what they wanted, and so many of the agendas were hateful.
I became averse to America and its obsession with dominance, violence, and money. New York was no longer the center of my world, but a city I felt more and more trapped in. The center was really rotten, and I needed to break out of the vision of society and value system that I was told to swallow. After graduating high school, I spent the next ten years outside of the U.S., attending university in Montreal and then working as a photojournalist for Reuters in West Africa for six years. My time abroad was foundational because it allowed me to grow and learn about the world outside of New York and outside of America. I covered political and social issues across the region, like the French military’s invasion of Mali, the 2014 revolution in Burkina Faso, and the Boko Haram conflict in Nigeria, Niger and Cameroon. I also did stories on fashion, education, sports, and more.
Working in West Africa allowed me to engage with my identity without the spotlight of American whiteness surveilling my every move. White supremacy soaks societies across the globe and West Africa, with its history of slavery, colonization and economic subjugation by Europe, is no exception. But to live and work in Black countries, and where American cable news doesn’t dominate the zeitgeist, was liberating for me as a white person. As a foreigner, I was outside of the social expectations of the white community I grew up in.
Being away from the U.S. changed me, and when I came back to New York almost five years ago, I remember the vision of a landscape razed and bloodied by whiteness. Walking down Madison Avenue, surrounded by the cold, hard metal and glass of skyscrapers clouding out the sunlight, I imagined the soil underneath the concrete, what secrets it contained. What color was the dirt? Was it beige, red? Whose many thousands of hands, whose bodies built these mammoth structures, and for what purposes? The sheer amount of resources invested in New York represented a form of violence, and the feeling that followed 9/11, the feeling that I had been lied to my whole life, came shooting back to the top of my throat.
As I walked past the home I grew up in, the streets, the statues, and the buildings took on new meanings. James Madison, drafter of the Constitution and architect of the Louisiana Purchase, owned more than 100 slaves and proposed that black people were three-fifths of white human beings. How could one want to live or work on Madison Avenue, knowing that information? Why was this man, so odious in his abject racism, a hero enough to have one of the main roads in New York named for him, and that name to be associated with high real estate value? Manhattan is from a Lenape name that Henry Hudson’s first mate Robert Buel wrote as “Manna-hatta” in his log in 1609. Buel mentions “Manna-hatta” in a chapter called “Treacherie of the Savages,” shortly after detailing how his crew murders multiple indigenous people. What do Lenape people hear when they hear the word Manhattan?
I looked at the downtown Manhattan neighborhood I grew up in differently. This information was readily available, but it had taken me a long time to learn because it required a process of unlearning. Trinity Church, where I went to preschool, was built using slave labor. Wall Street was not only a Wall to keep out indigenous people who defended themselves against the aggressive attacks of European colonizers, but it was also the site of a slave market.
Across the street from the New York Stock Exchange, in front of Federal Hall, stands a large statue of George Washington, and tourists queue up to take pictures of themselves standing under his feet. But George Washington also considered African people to be less than humans, owned slaves from when he was 11 years old to his death, and pulled their teeth to make his dentures. Inside the Federal Hall, I found a plaque that contained the most blunt truth I had seen in a while. Describing the marble building that cost $1 million and opened in 1842, the plaque says that New Yorkers “appreciated its temple-like form, symbolic of the city’s worship of money.” A few paces away on 40 Wall Street, “THE TRUMP BUILDING” accosts pedestrians in gold lettering.
What hit me hardest, what gave me a feeling of dread and grayness in my heart, was when I looked more into the African burial ground, the site of up to 20,000 “human skeletal remains” that were found 30 feet underneath New York’s City Hall and the surrounding federal buildings when excavators prepared for construction on a new tower in 1991. That the center of political power in the most powerful, richest, most important city in the world was literally built on the bones of free and enslaved Black people—some likely from the same places I worked in as a photojournalist—summed it up. The callous hatred for black life on which my home was built made me sick. I was overcome by the violence that surrounded me, the violence that I grew up with and unwittingly participated in through my silence, the violence that was everywhere and yet didn’t seem to bother white people.
The National Parks Service monument for the African burial ground, where some of the skeletal remains were reinterred in 1993, is a touching tribute, and does important work to acknowledge the historical crimes and trauma that underpin the physical and psychological structures of New York. But across the street from the memorial is the headquarters for Immigration and Customs Enforcement in New York, a federal agency predicated on white supremacist values.
September 11th was the catalyst to a journey that changed my relationship to my nationality, to the neighborhood I grew up in, and to my own identity. The tragic events shocked me but also broke the American illusion in me at an early age. It set me on a path I’m still walking, that of humanity, which is a path that I believe runs perpendicular to the core of the American project.
America is an ongoing crime scene, and it also exports its horrors. One of the most shocking scenes in recent memory was the young Afghans falling from American military airplanes, a particularly painful marker 20 years after bodies fell from the Twin Towers. 17-year-old Zaki Anwari, a young soccer star whose whole life was under American occupation, was one of them, a whole universe crushed as he fell from the Kabul sky. Body parts were also discovered in the landing gear of American aircraft on arrival in Qatar. Yes, it is good to end the war in Afghanistan, but no plane should take off with people clinging to the outside of it. The cruelty to reproduce that pain will stick with me for a long time.
After spending so much time outside New York in the decades that followed 9/11, it’s taken me years to get back into living here and to find where I fit in what is an overall brutal society. But I’ve found strength in community and in the boldness of New Yorkers, who despite the ravaging pandemic has ravaged, really do keep the dynamic spirit of the city intact. New York is my home because of the people fighting to make it a more human place. It still has something special for me and for millions of others. Above all, people here want to make things happen, a value I share deeply.
But like the pandemic and like the war in Afghanistan, so much of the violence this country causes and experiences is entirely preventable. The root of this country’s violence did not need to happen, and it needs to be addressed to prevent more cycles of violence and destruction. This country can be remade, and it must be.
What an incredible perspective and personal experience beyond the day, from your eyes. Thank you
Thanks for that moving essay, Joe!