Thread by @akurjata

I'll be honest, 9/11 didn't have a profound impact on me when it happened. Our school didn't send people home or bring tvs into classrooms. I remember finding out because people were talking about it but it wasn't immediately an obviously life-changing moment.

For me, the way 9/11 changed my life was a much slower process: It provided a window for mainstreaming hatred of other parts of the world, and the justification of war.

Reading this yesterday it came back to me just how normal these sentiments were in the months and years that followed. And at the time I was leaving high school and headed into a poli sci degree as "fuck 'em, nuke 'em" attitude was coming into vogue

https://twitter.com/DavideMastracci/status/1435594645073969156?s=19

By 2006 you had Maclean's putting a moral panic replacement theory story on its cover. And as a young white dude who didn't think too deeply about these things I was like "oh, hm, interesting".

And this is the part where I'd like to think I would have seen the flaws in this eventually anyways, without help.

But it haunts me that I'm not sure.

My girlfriend at the time... my wife now... Her mother, grandparents, etc are Muslim refugees.. expelled by Idi Amin. And so this "interesting discussion" about the demographic replacement of Canada and the United States with Muslims was not an interesting intellectual discussion

Nor were these poli sci classes we took together where the question of whether Islam could be incorporated into western democracies something to be debated. It was/is her life.

And it took me a stupidly long time to understand that

Our only argument about this I don't think was that long, maybe an afternoon, but it is easily the most wrong I have ever been and I continue to wonder how she even put up with it

But I profoundly remember when the lightbulb went off in my head. It was the first time, I think, I was really aware of my whiteness and all the privilege that entailed, including the ability to treat other people's lives as interesting policy discussions

Like I say, I hope I would have recognized this eventually anyways. But I don't know. The post 9/11 world created an environment where fear of brown people was treated as a legitimate political view, under the lense of "realism". I look back and it seems pretty clear how we got..

.. things like the barbaric cultural practices hotline, niqab bans, "shithole countries", etc. And how easy it is for someone like me to go along with it, never really being challenged or engaging

Obviously it wasn't all 9/11. The underlying attitudes were there and still would be. But it was utilized, exploited, as a cover under which these attitudes were brought back into acceptable mainstream political discourse. And we're still living with that

I'm seeing and retweeting stories from people who are Muslim about 9/11 and its impact on hoe they are viewed and treated, by others and themselves. And I agree with @rjjago is it's difficult to see the day without the lens of everything that followed