P.O.V.
When I was maybe 4 years old, my aunt took away the remote control and changed the TV to something I didn’t want to watch. Incensed, I decided to block the image of the screen by covering one of my eyes and smirking at my genius. Unimpressed, she said that this gesture only blocked my own view — she had her own set of eyes to see with.
***
In the summer of 2023, one of my Russian students commented on how adaptable human beings can be. For example, he said, you could inform another person from another century in a matter of hours how to live in modern society. Of course, this would take some time, explaining the basics of space exploration and the existence of a new continent.
This comment struck me — what if this time-traveller were from the “New World,” a place that has been inhabited by humans for thousands of years?
***
One memorable activity from my high school Sociology course began with a short text for us to read. It described a typical domestic scene: a working mother comes home and greets her children while flipping on the TV or radio. The broadcast is dire: nuclear war has begun, and the city the family lives in is due to be vaporized in minutes. It was a pretty jarring text, ending with the revelation that this family lives in Moscow, Russia — not in Middle America.
Since this was 2001, not 1961, the class responded with empathy, rather than indifference (or triumph). The teacher was surprised that we weren’t more shocked. Why would we be? We knew that the Russians loved their children too.
***
I was in the same classroom a year later, watching the World Trade Center’s second tower collapse on live television. The same teacher started to call family on her contraband personal cell phone, antennae and everything, as I stood facing the TV.
“Those people…! Those people are all dead!” my teacher shouted.
“Yeah,” was all I could muster.
The next year was filled with hyperbole and panic and terror. With anthrax in the mail and the Second Intifada in Israel, any unusual crime was cause for hysteria. People were on high alert.
For what? No one knew.
***
A flaming 18-wheeler was covered by news crews outside of Dallas, Texas. At my part-time job, thousands of miles away in Maryland, one of the bosses asked if it was terrorism.
“No,” said my friend. “Just some idiot in Texas”
“Don’t!” he added, preempting me from saying something unkind about President George W. Bush.
While he was joking, such a spirit of silence around the failings of the US government had begun in earnest and, arguably, are still in effect (except when a Democrat is in office).
***
In Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates reflects on 9/11:
I kept thinking about how southern Manhattan had always been Ground Zero for us…I did know that Bin Laden was not the first man to bring terror to that section of the city.
Coates is referring to Wall Street’s origins in the slave trade. Generational trauma, to say nothing of the plights of the individuals treated like property, loom large in the Black American collective conscious. However, these horrors weren’t enough to sanctify this spot in white American consciousness.
That school year was the same one where I first heard “One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.”
***
Such lessons about perspective are the ones I’ll never forget.
