An assistant professor in the political science department at Syracuse expressed outrage and how people talk about the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
Jenn Jackson describes herself as a “queer genderflux androgynous black woman, an abolitionist and a lover of all black people.” She took to Twitter to say she is “really disturbed by how many white pundits and correspondents talk about” Sept. 11.
The tweets, which are now protected, mention Andy Card and Jeh Johnson. Card and Johnson are not pundits. They aren’t correspondents either. Card delivered the news of 9-11 to President George W. Bush while Johnson served as Secretary of Homeland Security under President Barack Obama.
Card detailed the fear felt by Americans following Sept. 11.
“Card just said that 9/11 was the first time that Americans ever felt fear. He said that it was the last morning we woke up without fear and that the ‘terrorists’ succeeded in introducing us to fear. Wow. That’s hella incorrect,” Jackson wrote. “White Americans might not have really felt true fear before 9/11 because they never felt what it meant to be accessible, vulnerable, and on the receiving side of military violence at home. But, white Americans’ experiences are not a stand-in for ‘America.’
“Plenty of us Americans know what it’s like to experience fear and we knew before 9/11. For a lot of us, we know fear *because* of other Americans. We have to be more honest about what 9/11 was and what it wasn’t. It was an attack on the heteropatriarchal capitalistic systems that America relies upon to wrangle other countries into passivity. It was an attack on the systems many white Americans fight to protect.”
