Twenty-five years ago, I was sitting in a high school history classroom watching history happen in real time.
I was 17 years old, a junior in Fairfax County, Virginia, about 30 minutes south of the Pentagon. My father worked for the Defense Intelligence Agency at Bolling Air Force Base in Washington, D.C. My uncle worked at the Pentagon.
The Pentagon was part of our family’s daily landscape, not some distant landmark. From the DIA building at Bolling, you could look across the Potomac River and see the Pentagon on the other side. So when we learned that a plane had struck it on September 11, 2001, this wasn’t simply an attack happening somewhere else in America. One of the buildings under attack was visible from where my father worked. My uncle was inside it.
I remember my history teacher turning on the television. At one point, she turned it back off because we had a lesson to finish. But history wasn’t going to wait for the lesson plan. After someone alerted her to what was happening, the television came back on.
America was under attack.
Throughout the day, parents rushed to school to pick up their children. By the final period, there were sometimes only two or three students left in a classroom.
I wouldn’t see my father until around midnight. My uncle survived the attack on the Pentagon.
That night, because we lived so close to Washington and no one knew whether another attack was coming, we slept in the basement. I remember hearing fighter jets roaring overhead about every half hour.
I can still hear them.
At 17, I didn’t understand the geopolitical forces that had brought America to that moment. I only understood that the country I had awakened in that morning had changed before I went to sleep.
For a moment, we were simply Americans
Something else happened after September 11 that has stayed with me.
America came together.
We heard stories of Americans saving other Americans. Strangers helped strangers. Flags appeared everywhere. Red, white and blue covered the country.
For a brief moment, race seemed to matter less.
That is important for me to say as a Black man because race had always mattered in America. Yet something felt different.
We were grieving together. We were frightened together. Someone had attacked us—not Black America or White America, Republican America or Democratic America.
America.
My father continued going to work to defend this country. My uncle had survived an attack on the building where he served this country. They were Black men who wore their commitment to America proudly.
At 17, I wondered whether perhaps America had finally seen something in itself that it had struggled to see before.
Maybe we really could be one nation.
But even as American flags multiplied, something else was growing alongside that unity: fear. We wanted to know who had done this to us. We wanted someone held responsible. And once America believed it knew what the enemy looked like, the boundaries around that word “us” began to shrink.
The same country that had spent days insisting that we were all Americans began looking suspiciously at some Americans.
Muslim, Arab, Middle Eastern and South Asian Americans suddenly found themselves answering for the actions of people they had never met. I remember feeling for friends caught between pursuing the same American dream as everyone else and having to prove that they belonged to the country they called home.
That was perhaps my first indication that the unity I had found so inspiring after September 11 was more fragile than I understood at 17. America had not stopped seeing race or difference. Our fear had simply shifted where we were looking.
The word terrorist took on enormous power.
So did fear.
And fear didn’t remain confined to the people America suspected.
It changed the country itself.
Airports changed. Surveillance expanded. We went to war. National security became embedded in everyday American life. The attacks had happened in a matter of hours, but America’s response would reshape the next quarter-century.
And as those years passed, Black Americans began seeing something familiar in the country that emerged.
We already knew what it meant to live under suspicion.
When the imagery of war appeared at home
The militarization of American policing did not begin with September 11. The Pentagon’s 1033 program predates the attacks. But the post-9/11 era normalized a national-security culture and a visual language of armored vehicles, tactical equipment and heavily armed forces.
Then came Ferguson.
After Michael Brown was killed in 2014, Americans watched heavily equipped police confront protesters in Ferguson, Missouri. For me, the symbolism was impossible to ignore.
America had spent years showing us what the War on Terror looked like abroad. Black Americans were now seeing the imagery of militarization in our own communities.
The 25 years since September 11 carried us through Hurricane Katrina, the election of Barack Obama, Ferguson, Black Lives Matter, the murder of George Floyd and a national reckoning over race and policing.
The country that had briefly seemed capable of looking beyond race had returned to one of its oldest arguments: Who belongs? Who is dangerous? And who gets to be considered fully American?
Those questions become even more complicated when we consider terrorism itself.
Black Americans watched nine Black worshippers murdered by a White supremacist at Mother Emanuel in Charleston.
We watched another White supremacist travel to a predominantly Black neighborhood in Buffalo and murder Black people shopping for groceries.
So 25 years after September 11, I find myself asking a question I couldn’t have imagined asking at 17:
Who does America instinctively picture when it hears the word terrorist?
The America I thought we were becoming
One of my strongest memories from the weeks after September 11 is seeing the American flag everywhere.
At school, it didn’t feel partisan. The flag didn’t seem to belong to one political movement or one kind of American.
It belonged to us.
That memory feels distant in 2026, when patriotism itself can become entangled in our political and cultural divisions.
Maybe that is what saddens me most.
Not that America was perfect before September 11. It wasn’t. Not that racism disappeared afterward. It didn’t.
It is that, for one extraordinary moment, I saw evidence that Americans could recognize one another’s humanity before our differences.
And I was young enough to believe it might last.
Sometimes I think about my history teacher turning off that television because she wanted us to get back to the lesson.
None of us knew yet that the television was the lesson.
Twenty-five years later, I think about that 17-year-old Black boy sitting in that classroom. I think about my uncle inside the Pentagon and my father across the Potomac at Bolling Air Force Base. I think about waiting for him to come home. I think about sleeping in the basement and hearing fighter jets roaring overhead.
And I think about those flags.
I was naive to believe that a single tragedy could erase divisions America had carried for centuries. But I don’t regret believing in what I saw.
Because for a brief moment after one of the darkest days in American history, I saw what this country was capable of being.
Twenty-five years ago, I thought I was watching America become something new.
Today, I realize I may have been seeing something even more important: a glimpse of the America we still haven’t figured out how to become.
