The young adults whose coming of age roughly coincided with the tenth annaversary of 9/11 have little trouble recalling the details of that day. It was September 11, 2001, and most of them were at school when it happened.
DePaul senior Anthony Langone remembers hearing his teacher crying in the hallway. She came inside and drew the blinds over all the windows from which Manhattan’s skyline was visible. Langone’s middle school was located in his home borrough of Queens.
“People started getting pulled out of class really fast, then they took us into the assembly room and told us what happened,” he said. “But none of us really understood; we were eleven years old.”
Fortunately, Langone’s family wasn’t physically affected by the tragedy: “My aunt was 8 months pregnant worked in the Trade Centers, but she was sick and didn’t go to work that day.” He said that the mental and emotional effects, however, are still with him today.
“I always fear flying home, or flying out of New York,” he said. “For my friends and me, it wasn’t the initial reaction of the attacks, but the post-reaction that formed us as people and made it so significant.”
Langone believes that the events of September 11, 2001 shaped his generation’s outlook on life. “We’re a very skeptical generation,” he said. “I think it was a little bit of a loss of innocence for us.”
American Morning producer Mike Milhaven agrees. In a recent commentary published by CNN headlined, “How do I tell my kids about 9/11?” Milhaven asks, “How do you explain [the attacks] to children in a way where they aren’t terrified to go outside? I fear that once they learn, it will be a big step away from their childhood.”
For Sarah Sweilem, a junior at DePaul, 9/11 shaped her cultural identity. “When I was little, I thought it was cool to be Arabic,” she said. “Then 9/11 happened, and after that it took me until I was in college to think it was cool again,” she said. Sweilem’s parents sat down with her and her siblings the day after the attacks to tell them that people might start treating them differently.
“They said that people might be mean to us because they didn’t understand that we’re not all the same,” she recalls.
After that she stopped taking middle eastern food to school for lunch, and was embarrassed when her mother spoke Arabic with her in public. “I started to shy away from my culture, thinking, ‘Why would I want people to know?”
Sweilem recalls the lawsuit that ensued after 9/11 between her father and the City of Chicago. “He couldn’t get construction permits for his work downtown anymore,” she said. “He finally decided to press charges after a city alderman said to him, ‘You can’t prosper off of something you want to destroy.'”
“I completely accepted the ‘white girl’ after that,” said Sweilem. “I was in high school on the North Shore, and I didn’t want people to think I was a terrorist.”
Things didn’t change for Sweilem until she finished high school, when she says she realized that terrorism comes in many forms.
“I started thinking about how stupid it was that people associate terror with a face and I needed to show people a different face of the Arabic people. I’m an Arabic American, and I learned to completely embrace it again,” she said.
In his commentary, Milhaven asks, “How do you even begin to explain what a terrorist is? And once we explain that, how to we explain that this does not reflect the beliefs of all of the people in the countries where those bad people come from?”
Perhaps Sweilem best answers this question. She believes that most Americans who discriminate against Arabs are simply afriad, and that their fear will only grow if Arab Americans like her hide their heritage. “I realized that I needed to show people that there was nothing to be afraid of,” she said.
