Dealing with the 9/11 Trigger: Lessons on Race From a Group Exercise

Abstract

Given the patriotic wave that has hit the country since September 11, 2001, as a college professor in the United States who teaches her students to think critically, I have found myself devising strategies to talk about the attacks without triggering knee-jerk responses by my students. These are particularly necessary in times when the very mention of 9/11 is understood by students as an invitation to stand on their desks with their hands on their chests, singing about “the rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air,” or pledging “allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and the nation for which it stands,” and when articulating the attacks as anything other than an attack on our freedoms can be taken as an act of treason and subversion against the righteous U.S. government. If you do not know what I am talking about, I would advise you to look at David Horowitz’s The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America (2006). In this book, Horowitz uses writings and pronouncements made by 101 U.S.-based academics about 9/11 to advance his views on what he calls “academic radicals,” who in his view, “spew violent anti-Americanism, preach anti-Semitism, and cheer on the killing of American soldiers and civilians.”