Today is September 11th. NPR’s Morning Edition and Up First host Michel Martin posed the question – Do you remember where you were on September 11, 2001?
Martin goes on to suggest there are two opposing reactions to the question – ONE, insult. Those who lost loved ones, or who were physically close enough to experience first-hand sights, sounds, smells – how could I/we possibly forget??
The other response – from those too young or born after, or, simply too far away from Shanksville, PA or lower Manhattan – feels more exasperated “how many sad days, [tragedies], are people supposed to hold close?
Being of the former – I remember calling the College I worked at to find out what was happening with our final exams scheduled on that day. Campus was at 43rd Street and 5th Ave. The administrative assistant was puzzled by my question: we are open, exams are happening. He didn’t know, hadn’t heard. A plane has crashed into the World Trade Center, I told him, the building is on fire and bodies are dropping out of it. Those bodies were people, but I couldn’t yet put that into words. Exams were cancelled. Next came the smoke, and the smell of melting plastic, burning rubble. Then the stream of people, dusty with ash, walking dazed up Flatbush Avenue, deeper into Brooklyn – they had walked the whole way, across the bridge, over the river. Blessed to be walking.
I believe that memories are important for social justice, and Ahmed appears to agree:
Killjoy Committment: I am not willing to get over what is not over.
I also hear a bit of bell hooks’ “choosing the margins” here. Choosing the margin means keeping aspects of who we are, what hooks refers to as that “down home life,” even though we may have personally moved out of the margins through advanced degrees, elevated positions within institutions and systems, etc… When we choose to stay in the margin, it is no longer a site of deprivation, but rather one of radical possibility, a space of resistance
Ahmed’s take on “diversity work” in Living a Feminist Life clearly illustrates how institutions use equality and diversity as “masks to create the appearance of being transformed” (p. 90). More powerfully:
Killjoy Truth: Just because they welcome YOU, it does not mean they expect YOU to turn up.
That is, the YOU with the “other” racial, gender, sexuality memory/history; the YOU who fails at orientating yourself – a disorientation, who disturbs the whole picture and reminds those who “fit” that their survival relies on forgetting.
hooks brings Ahmed’s killjoy truth to life through recounting her experience:
During my graduate years I heard myself speaking often in the voice of resistance. I cannot say that my speech was welcomed. I cannot say that my speech was heard in such a way that it altered relations between colonizer and colonized…. I was made “other” there in that space with them. In that space in the margins, that lived-in segregated world of my past and present. They did not meet me there in that space. They met me at the center. They greeted me as colonizers. (2015, p. 151)
Institutions and systems push for “segregated worlds of past and present” to insure their power and dominance into the future. We can choose the margin, however, never forgetting our past, or histories, and using these memories as a springboard for change in the present and transformation for the future.
When we say “never forget” around September 11, 2001, we must first and foremost remember the lives lost and the devastation for families in the past, present, and future.
And we must also apply this same “never forget” resolve to continuing oppressions that restrict the freedom and flourishing of many around the world, and here in the United States. We must never forget Roe v. Wade, and what has been taken away from women and female bodied people in terms of bodily autonomy and reproductive rights.
We must never forget the seemingly endless list of names of people of color who have been murdered or otherwise harassed and abused by the police – the aggression towards and detainment of, the NFL’s Miami Dolphins star wide receiver and Black man, Tyreek Hill, just hours before kick-off this past Sunday as a immediate reminder. While Hill was ultimately released, and went on to excel in his game, he posed a million-dollar question in response to his experience:
What if I wasn’t Tyreek Hill?
When we “say his name” and “say her name,” I think we know the answer…
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