When two planes flew into the World Trade Center in New York and another plowed into the Pentagon, on September 11, 2001, they hit a country which lacked the kind of shared memory of trauma that existed in Spain and Argentina. That’s not to say US history is unmarked by repeated traumas. The United States was founded in domestic state terror, from the genocide of Indigenous peoples to slavery through to lynching and mass incarceration; trauma has been ever-present right up to this day. Moreover, very frequently, shocks and crises have been handmaidens to the worst abuses. In the aftermath of the Civil War, the promise of land redistribution as economic reparation to freed slaves was promptly betrayed. The financial crisis of 1873, known as the Great Panic, further entrenched the excuse that the economy was too ravaged and the country too divided—and instead of reparations came a reign of terror against freed slaves in the South. During the Great Depression, amidst economic panic, as many as two million Mexicans and Mexican Americans were expelled. After the attacks on Pearl Harbor, approximately 120,000 Japanese Americans (two-thirds of whom had been born in the United States) were incarcerated in internment camps; just as in Canada almost the entire Japanese-Canadian citizenry was rounded up and forcibly interned.
So the problem after 9/11 was not that the United States had no experience of how shocking events can be harnessed to attack democracy and human rights. The problem, rather, was that these past traumatic events, while very well understood within the communities impacted, were insufficiently understood more broadly: they are not part of a shared national narrative that could have helped all Americans see the difference between reasonable security measures and leaders taking advantage of fear to advance opportunistic agendas.
That’s why the Bush administration was able to mercilessly exploit the shock of the September 11 trauma to attack civil liberties at home and launch wars abroad, which we now know were justified through doctored intelligence. That’s why the neglect and violence of the state during and after Katrina came as no great surprise to the city’s African-American residents—yet seemed unprecedented to so many white Americans.
The split between people who were stunned by Trump’s victory and those who saw it coming followed similar racial fault lines.
Shock Resistance in the USA
But one thing that’s become clear since Trump took office is that the memory of how terror was exploited after September 11 lives on. Though Trump and his supporters have tried their best to use fear—of Muslims, of Mexicans, of violent “ghettos”—to control and divide the population, the tactic has backfired repeatedly. Since Trump’s election, countless people have participated in political actions and gatherings for the first time in their lives, and have rushed to show solidarity with people who have been cast as the “other.”
It began on Day One of the new administration. At Trump’s inauguration, small groups representing different movements—from climate justice to Black Lives Matter—occupied various street intersections to block access to the ceremony. Then, the next day, came the women’s marches: with some six hundred cities participating, this appears to have been the largest coordinated protest in US history, with an estimated 4.2 million people on the streets. And though large women’s organizations and established activists helped with the organizing and logistics, the original idea came from a retired attorney and grandmother in Hawaii, who said to a few dozen friends on Facebook: “I think we should march.”
I marched in DC with family and friends and was struck by the fact that, though women were in the majority, tens of thousands of men had shown up as well, standing up to defend the rights of their partners, mothers, sisters, daughters, and friends. And while some may have initially thought they were marching only to defend a woman’s right to make decisions over her own body, as well as for pay equity, they soon discovered that, in this new era, women’s rights are far more expansive, including Black women’s right to be free from police violence, and immigrant women’s right to be free from fear of deportation, and trans women’s right to be free from hate and harassment. As the mission statement declared: “This march is the first step towards unifying our communities, grounded in new relationships, to create change from the grassroots level up.”
This same spirit of unity has been on display when specific communities have been targeted by the administration, or by the wave of hate crimes it has helped unleash. The new activism was most visible after Trump issued the first of his Muslim travel bans, and tens of thousands of people—of all faiths and none—took to the streets and airports to declare “we are all Muslims” and “let them in.”
One of the countries included in the travel ban was Yemen. In New York, Yemeni-American families—who own many of the city’s ubiquitous corner stores (known locally as “bodegas”)—organized swiftly. This is not a community known for being politically active, nor is it one that is represented by big organizations or unions. And yet in a matter of days, the city saw its first “bodega strike,” with over a thousand businesses closing down, and some shopkeepers holding outdoor Muslim prayers. Thousands of their family members, friends, and customers came out to support them.
Faith groups have been particularly active in pushing back against the divide-and-conquer tactics. When Jewish cemeteries in St. Louis and Philadelphia were vandalized, for instance, Islamic organizations raised more than $160,000—eight times their initial goal—to help pay for the repairs. And when a white nationalist opened fire in a mosque in Quebec City in January 2017, killing six people and injuring nineteen, the response in the province and across Canada was powerful, including dozens of memorials and vigils, many of them outside mosques—from Vancouver to Toronto to Iqaluit.
Small acts too can assert our common humanity in an atmosphere of fear and division. Trump supporters launched a vicious online campaign to smear Linda Sarsour, a Palestinian American who was one of the organizers of the Women’s March on Washington, as a closet supporter of terrorism and an anti-Semite. Such false claims were precisely the kind of attacks that ruined lives and careers after September 11. But this time, it didn’t work—an #IStandWithLinda countercampaign rose up almost instantly, so loud and large that it all but buried the smears. And when immigration officers arrested 24-year-old Daniel Ramirez Medina—who had come to the USA from Mexico with his parents as a child—organizers launched a successful campaign for his release, freeing him from a Washington state detention center after more than six weeks in custody.