I still remember waking up on Sept. 11, 2001, and walking toward the kitchen for breakfast, where I heard my mother crying and gasping as she sat on the edge of our coffee table.

My dad stood behind her with his eyes fixed on the television, seemingly trying to understand what he was watching and what it might mean. My brother, only a couple of years older than me, was trying to make sense of it, too.

I was not. At least, not yet.

I was in second grade, and there is only so much a child that age can understand about the moment when one version of the world ends and another begins.

A Darkened Classroom

I remember going to Mrs. Keck’s class at Fresno Christian later that morning. She loved bears, and they were scattered throughout the room, one of those small details that has somehow survived in my memory for 25 years.

I remember the classroom being darker than usual and a projector being rolled out, and I remember that, instead of lessons and worksheets, we watched the news.

For most of the day, that was all we watched.

At that age, I did not understand geopolitics, terrorism, or why adults suddenly seemed so afraid. I understood that airplanes had crashed into buildings. I understood that people had died. Mostly, though, I understood what was happening by watching the adults around me.

My mother was crying. My father was silent. My teachers had stopped teaching.

Something terrible had happened, even if my 8-year-old mind could not yet comprehend its size.

The understanding came slowly in the days and weeks that followed, as the same images replayed on television and unfamiliar words began entering my vocabulary. Terrorism. Afghanistan. Iraq. War. Names, places, and ideas that had meant nothing to me suddenly seemed to consume every conversation.

I also began to understand something much closer to home.

Suddenly, Our Last Name Meant Something

We are Arab.

That fact had never seemed particularly complicated before Sept. 11. It was simply part of who we were, woven into our family, our last name, our food, our relatives, and the stories that came before us.

Afterward, it began to feel like something that required an explanation.

In the fear that followed the attacks, an entire religion was too often treated as though it were responsible for what a group of extremists had done, and the distinction between Arab and Muslim often disappeared entirely. To many frightened Americans, the differences did not seem to matter.

I remember children asking questions about my family and my religion. I remember some of my friends’ parents looking at me differently, and sometimes treating me differently, even though I was too young to understand exactly why.

I remember learning, in a strange way, that my family was Christian because I suddenly found myself having to explain that fact to other people.

We were Arab, but we were not Muslim, and somehow a second-grader was being asked to clarify a distinction that never should have determined whether someone viewed his family with suspicion in the first place.

I also remember being afraid for my dad and for relatives who looked more recognizably Middle Eastern than I ever did. With my pale skin, blue eyes, and strawberry-blond hair, I could move through the world without strangers necessarily attaching an ethnicity or religion to my face.

Not everyone in my family had that same experience.

It was a strange thing to understand so young, that someone could look at a person you loved, know absolutely nothing about him, and still decide what he believed, where he belonged, or whether he should be feared.

For a child, that was perhaps one of the most lasting lessons of the months after Sept. 11.

The America I Remember

Yet that is not the only America I remember from that time.

I remember flags everywhere, hanging from homes, attached to cars, filling storefronts, and appearing on shirts, hats, and seemingly every available surface. I remember a country desperate to come together after being wounded in a way most Americans had never imagined possible.

There was an extraordinary sense of unity, or at least the desire for it. People donated blood, gathered at vigils, thanked first responders, and embraced the idea that, whatever our differences had been the day before, we were Americans first.

Looking back now, what stays with me is the contradiction of those two memories existing at the same time.

America came together, but not everyone felt equally embraced by that togetherness.

There were people promising that terrorists would never divide us while Muslim, Arab, Sikh, and other families were suddenly being viewed with suspicion. There were American flags everywhere while some Americans felt compelled to prove that others were beneath them.

I could not have put any of that into words in second grade. I simply knew that something had changed and, somehow, my family’s last name had become part of that change.

Twenty-Five Years Later

Twenty-five years later, I understand the day differently.

I think about the nearly 3,000 people who woke up that morning expecting an ordinary Tuesday and never came home. I think about the husbands, wives, parents, children, siblings, and friends whose lives were divided permanently into everything that happened before Sept. 11 and everything that came after it.

I think about the firefighters, police officers, paramedics, and ordinary people who ran toward danger when every instinct must have told them to run the other way, and about those who survived that day only to become sick and die in the years that followed.

But when I think about Sept. 11, I also think about children like me, watching adults react to a world we were too young to understand and absorbing lessons about fear, identity, patriotism, and belonging long before we had the language to describe them.

An entire generation has now grown up without a memory of that morning. For them, Sept. 11 exists through photographs, video footage, history lessons, documentaries, memorials, and the stories passed down by those who remember where they were.

For me, it will never begin with a history book.

It begins with walking toward the kitchen and hearing my mother cry.

My dad standing behind her, unable to look away from the television, and my brother trying to understand what the adults already knew was terrible.

It is Mrs. Keck’s darkened classroom, surrounded by all of those bears, with a projector showing us images none of us would forget.

And it is a little boy slowly realizing that the country around him had changed overnight, and that the way some people looked at his family had changed with it.

I was only in second grade when the world changed on Sept. 11, 2001.

Twenty-five years later, I still remember.

About the Author

Anthony W. Haddad is a Fresno-based reporter and columnist best known for the award-winning Millennial View column series. He covers a wide range of topics, from pressing local issues and community concerns to the everyday challenges and experiences facing millennials today.

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