Thread by @ashtonpittman

The fear I witnessed among Latino communities in Forest, Mississippi this weekend reminded me so much of the aura of terror in the days after 9/11. The isolation. The dark rumors of attacks at local stores & schools. The way any horror seemed plausible. 1/
theguardian.com/us-news/2019/a…

Days after 9/11, I remember a woman told an in-law’s mother that she had given an Arabic man money to pay for something at a store, & he’d returned the kindness by telling her Al Qaeda planned to poison the nation’s Coca Cola supply. It was all made up. 2/

Some family members reacted by pouring out 2-liter bottles of Coke.

It sounds crazy & like xenophobic hysteria now, but we’d just watched 2 planes fly into buildings we thought would safely stand forever. Nothing made sense. Anything seemed possible. We felt besieged. At war. 3/

The net was still young. Most people relied on TV news or print. There weren’t any real fact-checking sites. Snopes was in its infancy, & mainly concerned with debunking chain emails (which were full of post-9/11 rumors). It wasn’t easy to instantly check a claim’s veracity. 4/

When I spoke to memebers of the Latino & Hispanic immigrant communities in Forest, Mississippi, that’s what I was reminded of: Isolation. People scared to go out in public, planning for economic armageddon & an uncertain future. Wars & rumors of wars. ( 📸: me, in Forest) 5/

“Right now, there’s still a lot of uneasiness within our Hispanic community, as far as feeling like they can get out in the community, go to school, and go shopping, those types of things. It’s just fear.” #ICEraids 6/x theguardian.com/us-news/2019/a…