Today is the 12th anniversary of the September 11, 2001 terror attacks in New York and Washington D.C.
The attacks killed more than 3,000 people, and shook the country to its core — leading the U.S. into two wars: one in Afghanistan, justified by the attacks, and the other in Iraq, based on a dubious case made by the Bush administration.
Twelve years later, with a new administration in office, and the country once again considering action in the Middle East (in fact, in the country next door to Iraq — Syria); we look back on the many ways 9/11 changed everything.
1. Suspicion
African-Americans have long labored under the constant surveillance of police, and the suspicion of our fellow Americans. The notion that any black man is potentially a criminal menace is in some ways baked into the American experience, dating back to slavery and the endemic fear of white slave-owners toward the masses of unpaid laborers, ripped from their own countries, often ill-treated, and who in many cases outnumbered the white plantation bosses.
American culture evolved a systemic fear of the black male, and an attendant disregard for black womanhood, that has taken many, sometimes violent, forms (think Jim Crow and lynching in the post-Civil War south, or race riots and racial profiling in the north).
After 9/11, another group, American Muslims, became subject to mass suspicion. It was those who either were, or appeared to be, Muslim who fell under the suspicious gaze of authorities and fellow citizens, whether at the airport, in the streets, or when seeking to build a mosque in New York City. And while hate crimes against Muslims spiked after 2001, African-Americans remained the most frequent victims of bias-related crime.
And complaints about post 9/11 racial profiling at the airport aren’t just affecting Muslims, they’re impacting blacks (and Hispanics) too.
2. Obama
Barack Obama became the Democratic nominee in 2008, in large part because of his opposition to the Iraq war — a war of choice started by the Bush administration on the false premise that Saddam Hussein had something to do with 9/11. That false case, which included allusions to nuclear capability and weapons of mass destruction that Iraq didn’t have, rebounded on the Bush White House once the war (initially strongly supported by most Americans) failed to turn up the evidence promised by President Bush and his team.
And it gave Obama, a freshman United States Senator who had been one of a very few American politicians to oppose invading Iraq back in 2003, when he was an Illinois State Senator, an advantage with Democratic primary voters over then-Senator Hillary Clinton, who had supported the Iraq war.
The irony of electing a candidate with the name Barack Hussein Obama (the Christian son of a Muslim-turned-atheist, African father) seven years after 9/11, even in an atmosphere of continued mass suspicion of all things Muslim or Muslim sounding, was rich. But it’s arguable that Iraq made it all possible.
3. Black troops
A 2005 study by the General Accountability Office found that blacks made up a higher percentage of Army recruits after 9/11 (at nearly 15 percent) than their percentage of the overall population (11.3 percent in 2003), and black Americans had the highest recruitment-to-population ratio of any group, at 1:44 (versus 1.01 for white Americans.) blacks and Native Americans have long been overrepresented in the military, in part due to the career and training opportunities available, despite the GAO finding that recruitment post-9/11 was not disproportionately concentrated in zip codes with large percentages of black residents.
4. Government jobs
When most people think of post-9/11 lawmaking, they think of the notorious Patriot Act. But in fact, the PATRIOT bill was just one of several laws that rushed through congress after the attacks. PBS in September 2011 pointed to some 130 separate laws introduced in congress in just the first year after the attacks, 48 of which became law.
Some of those laws created brand new agencies, like the Department of Homeland Security and the Transportation Security Administration; just two of the 263 government agencies born or reorganized after 9/11. Those new agencies meant government jobs that, up until austerity kicked in after the 2010 elections, prompting massive furloughs and a federal hiring freeze, benefited Americans of all backgrounds, including large numbers of African-Americans nationwide.
5. Looking inward
The latest NBC/Wall Street Journal poll finds that six in ten Americans oppose military action in Syria, and though African-Americans are more split, with about 47 percent favoring a military strike and 45 opposing it (and black members of congress caught between public opinion and the first black president), the two wars that followed the 9/11 attacks have drained American popular will to act on the international stage.
Americans are looking inward — to an economy still dragging along in recovery, to a desperate need for jobs and an economic boost, particularly among African-Americans, whose unemployment rate remains double that of the white population (though at 13 percent in August 2013 it was 3.7 percentage points lower than it was in August of 2011, when black unemployment reached its highest rate since 1984), and to a country in need of infrastructure repair and a return to a sense of national mission; the kind of unified sense of mission, ironically, that so many Americans felt after 9/11.
Follow Joy Reid on Twitter at @thereidreport.