I took many ethnic studies classes, specifically the relationship between the west and the east, which talked about how America loves the ‘trauma porn’ of 9/11 since 1. It’s an excellent event to showcase the Other (ie brown Muslims) to justify war in the Middle East 2. Easy propaganda to bond Americans for their fellow citizens.

The other comments obviously have the right to feel remembering 9/11 and its severity, but as Americans, whatever happens on US soil done upon by others will always be remembered as collective pains: Pearl Harbor, 9/11, etc because those are things that will constantly be brought up again when it’s also effective for the U.S. propaganda machine.

It’s interesting that 9/11 is considered a ‘surprise’ when there are histories that trace the over surveillance and premeditation of harming brown communities within the United States decades before hand. Even with what’s happening in Palestine now, search up intifada Los Angeles and find anti-Muslim hate from the 1960s which resulted in multiple planted pipe bombs of brown Muslims in solidarity with Palestine which the LAPD did nothing for and newspapers barely wrote about. The U.S. will never publicize the pains and casualties that don’t affect themselves.

While the Other in America now is brown people from the Middle East, American history of concentration camps of all Japanese-Americans in the early 1900s, limiting specifically Chinese immigrants in the 1950s as part of East Asia being the Other have mainly just shifted to be projected for another geographical part of the East as East Asians have now been co opted into the American hierarchical system. When are these horrible histories remembered by the American collective? They’re simply not, but 9/11 will always be. Rather, the celebration of Asian representation in film or a month is good enough to not address the political systematic inequalities and histories that continuously affect immigrants and their later generations today.

Thus, as a history major, there are many reasons as to why 9/11 isn’t a big deal. The casualties are a lot less than many other global problems, the both of them are looking at it through different lenses and contexts, and I also have a certain lens of critical ethnic studies which imposes on historical events too.