9/11 and How I Discovered I Was Brown

It’s the 25^th anniversary of 9/11, an odd sentence if only because anniversary feels like a word used in celebration and 9/11 — for all the memes it produces today — was one of the most collectively traumatic events in recent American history.

It feels incomplete to discuss September 11th, the cultural product, in just 5,000 words. Not because it’s too somber, but because it is both too large and too stupid.

Importantly, there’s no real issue with people making fun of the fact that 9/11 was a defining, epoch-changing event in the lives of millennials, but one can recognize the absurdity of memes and their intended shock value while also understanding that it was formative.

It was formative. But it was formative for different people in different ways.

It certainly has been a millennial activity to talk to others about where they were when they learned the towers had been attacked. It’s not a particularly interesting story most of the time. It happened on a Tuesday morning, so most of us were in school.

My experience, probably unsurprising to most people, was characterized by arguing with a teacher.

We had just switched to block scheduling at our school, and the administrators had to invent a class to fill the gap in the schedule — seven classes converted into eight blocks meant they had to produce a new subject. Our school district, I would argue, did a very poor job figuring it out.

The class they invented was “Communications,” meant to draw coursework from many of the other classes to reduce teacher and student workload in those subjects, particularly in Language Arts. It proved to be a fairly aimless block, and I likely would have forgotten it if it weren’t for 9/11, which is probably the least of that day’s legacies.

As we filed into that class to begin our second block of the day, one of my classmates, Jack, asked the teacher to turn on the television. I snorted in laughter, thinking it was kind of a silly request. Sure, the class seemed useless, even this early in the year, but television? Alright, Jack.

Our teacher knew why Jack had asked. I remember our teacher smiling at him, telling him no with a chuckle. It felt condescending in the moment, and particularly so after I had learned why Jack had asked him to turn on the TV.

So, after a surprise midday announcement informed us of what had happened, the class erupted into chaos, with the teacher attempting to calm a bunch of panicking eighth graders.

It is perhaps in that spirit that he responded to a question, “Are we going to war!?” with a calm, smiling… patronizing… shake of his head. He said, “No, we’re not.”

I couldn’t help myself. Instinctively, before my conscious self could even process the notion of restraint, I yelled, “bullshit!”

He didn’t appreciate that.

Perhaps that was the wrong move on my part. In fact, it almost certainly was. But it also was probably not smart of him to set up a position so wrong that it could be foiled by the political instincts of an eighth grader.

I made my case, loudly. The teacher attempted to calm me down.

I yelled that I was calm.

It was pretty apparent, even at the time, that I couldn’t process 9/11. What I could process, however, was someone being wrong. So, I focused on that.

In my memory, I argued that the first attack on the American mainland in nearly two centuries would demand a military response. Whether that information — it being the first attack on the continental United States since the War of 1812 (not true) — was something I learned from the announcement or the television (perhaps turned on after the announcement?), I have no idea. It may even be the case that this specific argument is a memory I fabricated after the fact to make me look better in my own head.

But I do know I made the argument that war was inevitable. And I was pissed that a teacher who knew better would lie to us.

I don’t think I was very cognizant of what it might look like for the only Brown kid in the class to argue vociferously with a white teacher that we were going to war.

There is something unsettling about growing up as a first-generation immigrant (which some refer to as “second-generation immigrant” because no one has agreed on the label) in the United States. Those familiar with the story might roll their eyes at how often they hear about the “unique” dynamic of having a foot in both worlds but belonging to neither one. It’s been a trope so long in these communities that comedians familiar with it roast it pretty effectively — Hari Kondabolu is astounding at that.

But this dispossession, as overbearing as it is to hear for some, is genuine. There is something indefinably alienating to know that culture is not produced for you in any meaningful sense.

It is not just that the heroes on television and in movies are white — though that does have an effect — it is that there has been virtually no reflection of my experience in media. There are a million cultural signals one absorbs in family environments that are assumed in media. And, it turns out, in daily life.

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As one of a million examples, I recall going on a date with a friend I had known for years, and I sensed her getting upset with me throughout the date, and I had no idea why. I think in most contexts this could just be chalked up to the general obliviousness of a college sophomore.

But in this case, I happened to ask her. She told me that, in addition to me not holding the door open for her or pulling her chair out, she was upset that I ordered food first when the server arrived to take our orders.

Obviously, the broader picture is clear: we weren’t compatible and this particular kind of gendered deference isn’t something I value or expect a partner to value. But that’s not really what stood out to me, especially at the time. I was stunned to learn that there had ever been an expectation (in a straight relationship, anyway) that the man let the woman order first in a restaurant.

It had never been communicated to me, either as an expectation in my life or something people had ever done.

This kind of alienation extends beyond an outdated relationship convention. There are dozens of social signals and norms I missed out on by not growing up in a white household, and there wasn’t a community of people who had an established culture I could be in conversation with.

I had to adopt the culture around me with none of the guidance others had. That means that I had to learn what Christmas is while I was selling wreaths for the Cub Scouts. Feeling left out, I begged my parents to celebrate and in so doing I had to teach them, using secondhand knowledge, what it is.

My neighbors had to teach me that it’s a rite of passage to take training wheels off of a bicycle — my parents had no idea that you were supposed to take them off. My fourth-grade teacher made fun of me (with the class laughing along) for not knowing who John Wayne was.

I share all of this not to relitigate past grievances — events I consider important enough to remember but not anything I regard as traumatic — but rather to emphasize how strange it was for my alienation to turn from an afterthought to become part of the national conversation.

I think it is difficult for many conservatives to understand the notion that race can be both a critical element of one’s identity but also not one that defines an identity.

To me, I am Arif. Not a Brown person first, Arif second. To my friends and peers around me, I am Arif. In lily-white Grand Forks, North Dakota, the students and teachers at the school, I am confident, understood me first as Arif and second as someone with a different skin color who didn’t quite get it.

But parceling out the portions of my identity that were obsessed with dinosaurs and Zoobooks and the parts of my identity that were formed by having to explain that turkey sandwiches on Thanksgiving weren’t really what I meant by turkey is nearly impossible. Both are me.

And that disconnection ran both ways; my parents could not relate to me or understand how I interacted with the world. I was not allowed to visit friends’ houses until much later than any other peer. I never went to sleepovers. Any friendships with girls were forbidden and then, when that rule became impossible to enforce, frowned upon.

I don’t speak Bangla, the language of my parents, and I don’t celebrate Bengali holidays. My parents tried to instill Muslim values in me and I occasionally practiced — but it didn’t stick. I don’t watch or understand their movies or music.

Cultural events were few and far between. I grew up hating my difference; for quite some time I refused to eat Bengali, Pakistani or Indian food on principle.

This alienation and cultural isolation is why Kal Penn is one of my favorite actors. For quite some time, this confused people.

Kumar from Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle?

But, in what seems to be a less notable role than Kumar from White Castle or even Seth Wright from the other Kiefer Sutherland show, Designated Survivor, Penn changed my life with his role as Nikhil/Gogol in The Namesake, an adaptation of a novel of the same name by Jhumpa Lahiri.

The book follows two generations of immigrants: the first-generation Ashoke and Ashima as they immigrate shortly after their arranged marriage from Kolkata, India, to New York and then follows Gogol and Sonia, their children.

The movie focuses much more on Gogol, who hates his name enough that he chooses to go by Nikhil (or “Nicky”), though Nair does give enough breathing room to the parents to tell their stories with enough depth to make their struggles central features of the narrative.

Penn and director Mira Nair beautifully capture the isolated spirit of the alienated child-of-immigrants as Gogol attempts to navigate both worlds, never fitting into either as he swings wildly between embracing one or the other.

Irrfan Khan’s portrayal of Ashoke, Gogol’s father, so powerfully reminded me of my own father that I cried when I learned he had passed away in 2020. To date, this is the only public figure I can recall mourning with such intensity.

I remember when Penn was campaigning across the country to get out the vote for Barack Obama, and he stopped at Macalester College, the school my then-girlfriend was attending. I had no idea he would be there, and so I was shocked to see him walk into the cafeteria.

He was mobbed by the students, almost all of whom were quoting lines from White Castle at him. I didn’t want to bother him. My then-girlfriend prodded me into talking to him, and I’m glad she did so. I worked my way through the crowd to shake his hand and told him The Namesake changed my life.

It’s strange knowing that a core memory of your life with another person is almost certainly not remembered by that other person. But it very much seemed like the world grew quiet around us as his face changed, dropping his campaigning and celebrity smile to look at me with all the seriousness in the world to thank me for telling him.

I recommend the movie.

This aside wasn’t to whine about being an immigrant but rather to point out this alienation occurred largely invisibly until it didn’t.

On a random Tuesday, I became a spokesperson for “reasonable Muslims,” somehow responsible for establishing the cultural paradigm of how white people interact with Brown people and what Brown people looked like.

I found myself defending a religion I was not particularly attached to but one that was persistently attached to me. So, for the first time in my life, I was defined by what I was not more than by what I was.

On the way to school, my mom would tell me not to advertise the fact that I was a Muslim, as if I could hide my brown skin or the fact that I had an Arabic name. I pushed back, arguing that this served as an opportunity to educate my peers.

I’m not sure either of us was correct, but certainly the fear represented in my mother’s plea was well-founded.

At the time, my mother and I had already moved to Bloomington, Minnesota, while my father was still in Grand Forks, looking for appropriate work closer to the cities before joining us in Minnesota.

There are a few gas stations in Grand Forks frequented by truckers, meaning many of the people filling up there aren’t from the town. My father was filling up his car at one of these stations when a trucker told him he wasn’t welcome there. He, in my father’s recounting, walked up to my dad menacingly.

Before my dad could respond, someone else pumping gas intervened. He told my dad’s harasser that it was clear the harasser wasn’t from here, and that he should continue filling up and then leave.

It worked. The trucker, seeing no support, went back to filling up his gas before departing.

It’s a story that contains within it terror and hope, the ugliness of division and the beauty of unity. It feels like a just-so, simple narrative.

I want to say this says so much about the town I grew up in, the town that came together during the Big Flood, and a town that helped push North Dakota to be the most performant state in educational metrics like NAEP math and science scores throughout the 1990s.

And in a way, it does.

I can’t speak to the racial animus of North Dakotans as I was growing up; I didn’t experience much more than the casual ignorance one would expect of an overwhelmingly white town, which is not the same thing as malice. But I do know that I would occasionally overhear rumors of hate crimes on the outskirts of town.

There’s not much to do with those rumors except catalog them. I only re-remembered them after my father told me about his near-incident at the gas station.

This re-realization of my racial otherness is a difficult thing to describe. There is, for many immigrants and children of immigrants a desire — unconscious or otherwise — to want to absorb a kind of whiteness (this is not universally understood and the literature is very contested). In this sense, whiteness does not mean the desire to literally become white, but rather to orient oneself as the default, the norm.

This is the “whiteness” of South Asian Republicans.

To see oneself in the media that does not reflect the mirror image back. To accept that the protagonist of the story you invent in your head is, naturally, a white person (usually a man).

Whiteness as a historical sociological construct is defined largely by opposition; whiteness is usually “not Blackness.” That is why, sometimes, sociologists will say there is no “white culture” even as there are inarguably cultural products produced by people who identify as white within a common culture.

They are not (usually) saying “white people do not have culture” or that there isn’t something indelible about the cultural products of Anglo-Saxon protestants in New England or Scandinavian Lutherans in Minnesota or white (often Irish-Scottish) Appalachians.

But rather it’s a historical recognition that whiteness as a concept did not exist until it was produced to otherize Blackness and, sometimes, “the Orient” (which historically included the Middle East as well as the “Far East”). Prior to these inventions, we’d see distinctness in European identities and subcultures; one was Gallic or Bohemian or Irish.

This is why whiteness was flexible. In being defined by what it is not instead of what it is, it could strategically include or exclude Irish, Italian, Polish or even Arab people from the class of white.

In The Limits of Whiteness, author Neda Maghbouleh argues that Iranians are both white and nonwhite when it becomes convenient to the politics of otherness, legally white (until extremely recently), often benefiting from white supremacy in some contexts and subject to racial discrimination and violence in other contexts.

It is this liminal space I occupied on September 11 and the years afterward.

Generally speaking, white people are not conscious of their racial identity in the way that racialized others are because of the norm-setting power of whiteness. The “default subject” is white. In a sense, whiteness is equated with racelessness — the luxury of not thinking about behaviors and perspectives as white-specific, instead thinking of them as “normal.”

I and many other children of immigrants had, prior to September 11, lived in an in-between zone. Not strategically white in the sense that I would ever be mistaken for white — but not othered like the Native children around me or the Black people on television. I would be reminded of my difference but invited to temporarily ignore it. And so, in that sense, I had access to occasional racelessness that many others did not.

Not after September 11.

I guess what I’m saying is that 9/11 is a mere event to a lot of people. To me it’s a turning point. But for most, in our cultural production of the event, 9/11 carries with it the memories of tragedy and some kind of sense of national pride, a moment of unity.

If just under 500 hate crime incidents seems outstandingly low, it’s not because the incidents we know about were overhyped but rather because these kinds of hate crimes are undercounted. Violence of this type can be categorized as anti-Muslim, anti-Arab or even anti-Sikh. And, importantly, violence against Arab-Americans is systemically and egregiously underreported, in part because of the removal of the category in 1992 (restored just recently in 2015) and in part because reporting to the FBI by local law enforcement is patchwork and voluntary.

They also, apparently, disappear on their way from state agencies to the FBI. The number of vanishing anti-Arab and anti-Muslim hate crimes seemingly equals the number of ones that are properly logged.

And when one asks households instead of police departments in victimization surveys, the undercount from federal statistics seems to be thirtyfold. And yeah, 15,000 seems more accurate than 500.