Current Events > growing up middle eastern in post-9/11 america was something else lmao

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i'd be sitting in history class in like 2005 and the teacher would ask our opinions about what to do in the middle east and some kid would raise his hand and be like "we should bomb it and kill everyone there" and like half the room would just casually nod lmao. there's a lot of tweets lately about stories like this from that time, i guess it was just that ubiquitous.

the one that really bugged me was this time i saw a pretty big dude call this little freshman arab girl a "fucking terrorist" because she wouldn't let him borrow a pencil or something and the teacher literally said nothing despite standing not even 3 feet away. can't imagine that shit flying today >_>

this was all in a liberal suburb of seattle too. ho-ly shit i can't imagine what was going on in places like texas or whatever

I'm shocked that happened in Seattle. I was living north of Seattle at that time. I was out of school by September 2001 though. I graduated high school that year. So I never experienced post 9/11 public school. But I always felt that most of the teachers I knew would not tolerate the stuff you mentioned

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dont be sorry ive said racist shit too

<_<

but the sheer brazenness + social acceptability of what i'm describing was definitely something else

Yeah I don't doubt it at all.

oh another thing is a lot of americans struggle to differentiate between different types of brown people so i'd catch a lot of latino-directed racism as well. never knew what to make of that >_> i don't expect explaining my actual background would've led to a better interaction

Yeah it was crazy. Basically anybody who was an immigrant or ethnic was considered non American.

half kuwaiti here who grew up in texas post 9/11

mind you my school had a demographic of like 45% hispanic 45% black 5% turk and 5% everything else

instead of people saying we should bomb the middle east we had pakistani kids saying we should bomb america instead. i also only ever got shit from pakistanis.

Nightmare_Luna posted...

half kuwaiti here who grew up in texas post 9/11
mind you my school had a demographic of like 45% hispanic 45% black 5% turk and 5% everything else
instead of people saying we should bomb the middle east we had pakistani kids saying we should bomb america instead. i also only ever got shit from pakistanis.

my experience with the pakistani community is they tend to remain extremely religious even after immigrating, whereas arabs/iranians/turks are usually less religious and then their kids just end up the usual american sorta-agnostic sorta-nonreligious whatever

KhlavicLanguage posted...

my experience with the pakistani community is they tend to remain extremely religious even after immigrating, whereas arabs/iranians/turks are usually less religious and then their kids just end up the usual american sorta-agnostic sorta-nonreligious whatever

yeah pretty much. there were some pretty religious turkish kids but there were an equal amount of lightly/non-religious ones. i got a ton of shit from pakistani kids for not being a REAL MUSLIM because im SUPPOSED TO BE MUSLIM because MY FATHER IS MUSLIM (even though i am not and never was muslim)

fucking annoying pricks

but its not the kids fault its their parents for being hyper religious.

I went to school with a Pakistani guy who called American's babies for wanting to bomb the Taliban.

Then he would go on a long ass rant about how it's better to kidnap and torture every Taliban member. He went into real minute and gory details of what he would do.

All the redneck 'Merica guys were like "Wow dude....that's too far".

If you ever get a chance to watch it there's an episode dealing with this in the show Ramy on hulu. It's like the second episode. They paint a hilarious and horrific picture at the same time.

Some fantastic comedy writing while dealing with a heavy issue. There are quite a few episodes dealing with stuff in the same way. I shill hard for this show.

My brother started dating a girl in HS shortly after 9/11. My dad was furious when he found out and accused her of being a terrorist, though he thankfully tell her directly. Shit's gotta suck.

KhlavicLanguage posted...

oh another thing is a lot of americans struggle to differentiate between different types of brown people so i'd catch a lot of latino-directed racism as well. never knew what to make of that >_> i don't expect explaining my actual background would've led to a better interaction

Happened recently with COVID and the Asian communities.

In my school there was a group of kids going around vandalizing prayer mats. And there was this one guy who was well known for pretty serious shit (Robbing, assault, battery, burglary ect) saying that he was going to beat up all the Muslims.

Then there was another big guy going around gut punching anyone looking asian or middle eastern. This was all in London btw.

Wonder how school is nowadays >_>

I remember those days vividly. Some America lady threatened to call her friends in the government to report me. I explained that I wasnt even Muslim. I am Coptic. She went on some rant about how that I was lying and it was a cover.

Racism against middle easterners is still alive and well though. Not as blatant as back then. We just arent acknowledged as a people at all so its all under the radar now.

Cleo_II posted...

I remember those days vividly. Some America lady threatened to call her friends in the government to report me. I explained that I wasnt even Muslim. I am Coptic. She went on some rant about how that I was lying and it was a cover.

Racism against middle easterners is still alive and well though. Not as blatant as back then. We just arent acknowledged as a people at all so its all under the radar now.

its most blatant at airports. i can be traveling with my family and i always get pulled aside while my brothers get let through because they have "white" names and i don't

fuck tsa they're all filth

Nightmare_Luna posted...

its most blatant at airports. i can be traveling with my family and i always get pulled aside while my brothers get let through because they have "white" names and i don't

fuck tsa they're all filth

I get pulled aside too. My passport still has my maiden name. Im always randomly selected for extra security. My husband never is and we almost always travel together.

Nothing has changed.

Just look at how reddit and Twitter talk about wanting to do war crimes to Chinese mainlanders.

I experienced both sides of that, it was certainly... something.

I'm certainly glad Hollywood at least has moved away from that era of movies because I was getting sick of it. Syriana, Rendition, Body of Lies, and so many more that were quite awful. Hell even books at the time were all about that. Russia being "the bad guys" again hopefully means a return to the 80s and 90s era of action movie bad guys.

But seriously it was not great. I've heard stories of overwhelming awfulness done to even just vaguely middle eastern looking people, but also stories of kindness so that helps. Like this one girl who was living in the states at the time had her car's tires slashed by racists with slurs written on it, and she was crying, but her neighbors were nice enough and helped her out, consoled her and helped her deal.

Still, this seems to be a persistent problem in America that no one is addressing. The media says middle east bad? Random acts of violence on brown people. The media says "virus from china"? Acts of violence towards any asian people. Its like the maniacs doing this are just trigger happy waiting for any excuse to hurt someone, and the idea is causing pain.

Also I always thought it was funny that all the PC/woke culture we've had in the last few decades and especially last few years... all that is thrown aside when it comes to TSA. Suddenly racial profiling is completely okay and expected and encouraged.

Pretty hard times being a Mexican American back then too. Bush fucking sucked (huge understatement) for all of us. Mfs were calling me the frijoles word in elementary school even though I was whiter than them lol

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Yep. Dude straight up admitted to being racist in this very topic.

Nightmare_Luna posted...

its most blatant at airports. i can be traveling with my family and i always get pulled aside while my brothers get let through because they have "white" names and i don't

fuck tsa they're all filth

Haha yeah it's really great being pulled aside, because clearly terrorists are masquerading as a family with kids to get one over on the good ole US of A :/

Honestly it's not as bad for me as it was in the 2000s, which was the worst. Although I have been pulled aside into the little "interrogation" room as recently as 2017. Last time I traveled to the States was before the pandemic, and funny story there were some pakistanis on the flight with me but they made the genius choice of wearing traditional pakistani thobes, and I couldn't help smiling sadly knowing what was going to happen to them. I made the conscious decision to walk right behind them as we were leaving the plane and going through customs and sure enough, the TSA immediately stopped them while not even giving me in my sweats and pullover a second look. It was just funny to me using TSA's known racism to get to baggage claim without hassle.