I am a fourth generation New Yorker who was close enough to have heard those planes hit World Trade Center on September 11th 2001. I will never forget that long walk home on that hot late summer day, the sound of one of the towers crumbling and the subsequent collective gasp from the people around me somewhere in Greenwich Village as we tried to make our way uptown on that grim morning.

On that day I was angry that this great city which has long been a haven for so many from around the world, including my own great-grandparents fleeing the pogroms and anti-Semitism of the Tsarist empire, was under attack. I also knew that because New Yorkers are a tough lot and that this is a tough town, it was going to take a lot more than a terrorist attack to bring us down-and I was right.

A few months after the attack, I remember reflecting that despite the tremendous loss we experienced on that day, the sense of victimhood that was beginning to be pervasive then, did not work well for my city. New Yorkers, like their city, think of themselves as tough, brash, energetic and resilient. After all, this is the city that never sleeps and, as the song says, if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere. Even in the face of the extraordinary horror that was September 11th, the role of victim has never quite the right fit New York. Fortunately, within a few more months, that sense of victimhood faded away in New York.

Unfortunately, it went to play way too big of a role in the American consciousness, particularly in the consciousness of what is euphemistically called real America-meaning white, straight, Christian America. One of the most radical, and rarely discussed, ways that September 11th changed the US is that since that day many Americans have begun to think of ourselves as victims. It is true we were attacked that day and the people who died in those attacks or because of their efforts to help on that day were indeed victims. However, the shared sense of national victimhood was a paradigm shift that went well beyond those individuals and their families who were genuinely victims.

That sense of victimhood, that somehow the US was perpetually at the wrong end of a cosmic injustice, despite the reality that we remained the wealthiest most powerful country in the world who, through our pursuit our foreign policies had not only helped save the world from fascism, defeat Soviet Communism and improved the lives of many, but had also violated human rights, destroyed lives and killed, immiserated and impoverished millions around the world, became an organizing principle of America’s identity and foreign policy. In the decades that followed the victimhood framework worked its way into our domestic political cleavages as well.

One way to see this is that in the weeks and months after September 11th, amidst the festival of patriotism and thirst for revenge, Americans began to ask of the terrorists who attacked us on September 11th, “why do they hate us.” This is, in fact, a very good question, one that might have revealed unexpected introspection and maturity on the part of the American people. Instead of taking that route, America, and then President George W. Bush, decided that terrorists hated us because of “our freedom.” It is true that the freedom the US offers to religious minorities as well as its, relative to some countries, tolerant environment for LGBT people, women and others was not something Jihadists like, but no thinking person can attribute Radical Islamic hatred of the US to that. However, that very conclusion sure made it easy for the US to avoid any self-criticism or trying to see the world from a perspective other than our own.

For this sense of victimhood to become fully rooted in the American consciousness the attacks had to be reframed as something that had not just happened to New York and on a much smaller scale to the Pentagon, but to the whole country. Generations of Americans have been taught to hate and fear New York and see it as not fully American. It is a city that has long looked very different than the rest of America. The city is much more Jewish, Muslim, gay, non-white and radical than the rest of the country. That was the city that was attacked and we were the people who felt the brunt of those attacks.

Accordingly, the attacks were quickly sanitized for white, straight and Christian America. The narrative emerged after September 11th accurately portrayed it as an attack on America while immediately overstating the threat the rest of the country faced. Necessary security precautions quickly morphed into security theatre, the passage of the Patriot Act which was attack on civil liberties, and fear-mongering about the Jihadists among us. The latter led directly to illegal harassment and surveillance of Muslim Americans. The truth is that the American security and intelligence forces were pretty good at making sure nobody was going to attack the US in the days following September 11th and if you were Muslim, non-white, Jewish or gay in middle America, you probably had, and today very clearly have, more to fear from white nationalists, like Timothy McVeigh, than from Jihadists back then.

Many of us who were here in New York when the attacks occurred experienced various degrees of trauma and had to work through that in the months and years after that. That process was not always made easier by a public retelling of the events that, for political purposes, stressed a desire for revenge, the heroism of politicians-of all things-and the need, always overstated, to live in fear. Muslim-Americans experienced the brunt of this, but it effected all New Yorkers. However, by framing the terrorist attack of September 11th as an attack that threatened all of America, rather than something that happened to New York, it made it easier for conservative America to support the post-September 11th policies while simultaneously going back to viewing New York as deviant and not the real America.

Ultimately, September 11th generated a great deal of national support for first responders and Mayor Rudy Giuliani rather than support for New York and New Yorkers more broadly, while those who waved the flag highest and called for revenge loudest also embraced the right wing politics that seek to use New York as a target-a dangerous place where violent radicals have taken over and destroyed the city.

Thus, an opportunity to begin to reverse the divisions that were already damaging the country was missed. In the twenty years since, those divisions have gotten worse and, as we have seen from the twin disasters of the Trump presidency and the Covid-19 pandemic, Americans are much better at destroying this country and killing fellow Americans than Al Qaeda ever was.

Photo: cc/Mr. TinDC

Lincoln Mitchell