Thread by @harikunzru

Lol. As someone who had to fly (while brown) a lot around the US at that time, the chaos, hysteria and ever-present threat of violence was inescapable.

It's disturbing to me that this kind of revisionism might become the norm. I was in LA on 9/11 and was due to fly back to London the next day. Obviously that didn't happen. While I waited for flights to resume I ended up (long story) in Las Vegas. There was nothing calm about it.

Every brown person who was around then will remember Balbir Singh Sodhi, the Sikh gas station owner in Mesa, AZ, who was killed on 15th September by guy who said he was 'going out to shoot some towel heads'

Las Vegas was, understandably half empty. But I remember a Sikh family who were walking through the lobby of a hotel. They were so frightened for the safety of their grandfather that they had him carrying a flag, and wearing another one in his turban.

It didn't feel safe. People didn't seem calm. I got home eventually. I was in New York in October. I remember being part of a silent group of people watching the work at Ground Zero. New York was actually a lot calmer than other places.

The following spring I did a book tour. On each flight, I was 'randomly selected' for extra screening. Screeners didn't know the procedures. More than once I was surrounded at the gate and taken away. I would board the plane last, and walk down the aisle with everyone watching

People assumed I'd been taken away 'for a reason'. And they don't want you on the plane afterwards. It's weird to see so many other people terrified of you. Women silently pleading, men working out if they could 'take you' if it came to it.

Some SF friends saw how freaked out I was, and we tried to make a joke of it. They made me this t shirt.

We knew this would be our new normal. And it was. After the backpack bombs in London in 2005, and the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes, I would sit on the tube, carrying my stuff in a plastic bag, and see all the other young South Asian guys with their plastic bags

So maybe @paulkrugman had an experience of noble calm and cheap air travel or whatever, but he shouldn't try and tell anyone that this was the 'reality'. It wasn't. And burying it, as people bury so much inconvenient history, isn't helpful.

Here are the actual stats

*Sigh* 19 years of this fatuous score keeping. As if sympathy for the victim of a hate crime takes away from sympathy for other victims. It’s not a zero sum game.

Here are some pictures I took at ground zero a few weeks after the attacks. I think about the message on the right a lot. But maybe, score-keeping guy, these aren't the *right* victims, the ones from your team?