I was in middle school when 9/11 happened. I remember our teacher stopping class to turn on the T.V. to see the Twin Towers crumbling. It was smoky and confusing, but the fallout was even worse.
The attacks changed race relations in America. It didn’t turn people into racists. Rather, it brought out the worst in people who were already prejudiced. In their newly imagined court of justice, it was somehow OK to scream at so-called “turban-heads” or assault someone who spoke with a Middle Eastern accent. Oddly, as dark-skinned people, we had to pay for the sins of the dark-skinned terrorists.
Nearly nine years have passed, but the wounds still haven’t healed. Attempts to build an Islamic mosque two blocks from the former site of the World Trade Center have been met with resistance from many in New York and around the country.
“This is demeaning. This is humiliating that you would build a shrine to the very ideology that inspired the attacks on 9/11,” yelled one protester at a community board meeting held last month to approve the center.
In a landslide vote, the board acted correctly to allow the mosque. It should be permitted near Ground Zero.
Read the rest of this column from Neil Manimala, columnist at the University of Florida.
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