… her [Katha Politt’s] subdued and almost mournful October 8, 2001, column, in which she related her discussion with her thirteen-year-old daughter about whether to fly an American flag from their apartment window. Pollitt pointed out the flag’s historic use as a symbol of “jingoism and vengeance and war”; her daughter said she was wrong, that the flag “means standing together and honoring the dead and saying no to terrorism.” Pollitt agreed that, sadly, “The Stars and Stripes is the only available symbol right now.” She closed by lamenting the lack of “symbolic representations right now for the things the world really needs —equality and justice and humanity and solidarity and intelligence.”
Unless you were a muslim or looked like one.
Agreed, reminds me of The Reluctant Fundamentalist and other such accounts where people already couldn’t feel American before 9/11, but especially more afterwards.
The especially high peak in 2001 is interesting, despite the fact that the attacks were relatively later in the year.
The US has spent its entire history priding itself as the land of freedom and opportunity yet simultaneously targeting all types of immigrants: Mexicans, Italians, Irish people, Chinese people, Japanese people, Germans, Russians, Arabs… Difficult to feel American if you weren’t born there as a white anglo-saxon protestant.
It’s amazing propaganda that people can still believe it despite literally having slavery and concentration camps within its own borders
It’s bad isn’t it. It suggests about 20–30 attacks up to September and then 450+ in three and a half months. If there were ever a graph that explains how state policy, etc, facilitates hate crimes, fascism, racism, this is it.