Consider This from NPR - BONUS: The Lost Summer

Episode Date: September 19, 2021

Twenty years ago, during the dog days of summer, a fledgling journalist named Shereen Marisol Meraji — maybe you've heard of her? — headed to Durban, South Africa. Her mission: to report on the meeting of thousands of organizers and ambassadors at the United Nations Conference Against Racism.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Support for NPR comes from NPR member stations and Eric and Wendy Schmidt through the Schmidt Family Foundation, working toward a healthy, resilient, secure world for all on the web at theschmidt.org. Hey, consider this listeners, it's Mary Louise Kelly, and we have got a weekend bonus edition for you. It is sad to say, but the amazing Shireen Marisol Maragi of NPR's Code Switch podcast has moved on to the world of academia. You will hear more about that later. Before she left us, she reported one more episode. Actually, the reporting is from 20 years ago, but it is a story worth returning to, as you will also hear. So, here are the hosts of Code Switch, Gene Dimby and and for one last time, Shereen Marisol Maragi.

Just a quick heads up, y'all. The following podcast contains explicit language. I'm Shereen Marisol Maragi. I'm Gene Demby. And this is Code Switch. From NPR. And if y'all don't know this yet, it is time for me to tell you that I am stepping away from co-hosting and senior producing Code Switch. I've been doing this for five years now, a little over five years now. And it's not because I don't love you, Jean, and I don't love what I do,

because this has been the honor of my life. And I'm not going away forever, people. Coats, which is going to be a home for my journalism. I've been obsessed with questions of racial identity and belonging and language loss since I can remember. Obsessed. I'm still in denial, but all this still in denial. Well, right now, let me make it more real for you. Right now, I'm talking to you from a closet in Cambridge where I'm doing a journalism fellowship, the Neiman Journalism Fellowship. Look at the come up, though. You were in a closet in LA, now you're a closet at Harvard. Is that a come up? I don't know. I miss LA.

We're here, you know, a bunch of us thinking big thoughts about the future of the industry, how to make it more equitable. And then from here, I go back home. I'm headed back to the Bay where I started a new job, not at San Francisco State, which was my alma mater, but at UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism. So fancy. Where I'm going to be teaching journalism. And Jean, in preparation, I've really been trying to go back, put myself in the early years of my journalism career back in their shoes. I was a new reporter once. What do I wish I knew? What were the formative moments of my career? And I just keep turning over and turning over this one event

that I covered that really shaped me as a journalist. And it made such an impact on me as a human being. So I'm taking Eugene and our listeners back in time 20 years ago to the summer of 2001. Midriffs and low-rise bootleg jeans are in. Very in. Kama Souls as tops. Oh, my God. An emerging talent named Alicia keys was all over the radio of love with you i know that this is helping jog your memory gene it is hard to overstate

how i'm the present how ubiquitous that song was. That song was on the radio or TV every 30 minutes, it seemed like. And I remember that summer very clearly because my beloved Philadelphia 76ers were in the NBA finals. We lost, but that's something there. We were still in the very early months of the George W. Bush administration. I was interning. And the biggest news story that summer, I remember this very clearly, was a scandal about the disappearance of Chandra Levy, this congressional intern in Washington, D.C., who was having an affair with a representative named Gary Condit. And so there was this whole big— From California. That's right, from California.

That was like the biggest story in the news. Yeah, that was the summer of 2000. And there was another big news event happening, huge actually, that of course the media at the time wasn't paying that much attention to. This groundswell of humanity converging on South Africa to talk about racism. The World Conference on Racism began this morning in Durban, South Africa. Thousands of delegates from more than 150 countries have traveled to that Indian Ocean port to attend the eight-day meeting. Do you remember that conference, Gene? That big event?

I vaguely remember that there was this thing and there was a controversy over the Israel-Palestine question. Exactly. That's the only thing I remember about it. Yes. Well, we're going to listen to the late Kofi Annan from Ghana. He was the Secretary General of the United Nations at the time. Tell us what the World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance was all about.

What were the intentions? Our aim must be to banish from this new century the hatred and prejudice that have disfigured previous centuries. So very lofty goals here. To banish from this new century the hatred and prejudice that have disfigured previous ones. I went right after my 24th birthday to Durban, South Africa to cover it. I had business cards made. They said Shirin Marisol Maragi in all caps

underneath independent journalist. Very official. I had no clue what I was doing. I need, before you leave us, I need one of these cards.

If you still have one, it's probably all yellowed and frayed on the edges. I want one. It actually is yellow. Did you save any of your old stories from that? I mean,

I didn't. How do you save things from that time period? It's like this weird black hole on the internet. But I knew, I remember that Latino USA played one of my stories while I was out there. Shout out to Latino USA. And our producer, Christina Cala, actually found it. And that story that I did, you may be surprised by this. It was about a group of young Puerto Ricans who went to Durban, South Africa, to call attention to the U.S. Navy's decades-long occupation of this little place called Vieques, Puerto Rico.

Which, I don't know if people know this, Shereen, but Vieques is the island that your Puerto Rican family is from. That's true. And the Navy used large parts of Vieques as a bombing range for decades. So you have Puerto Rican members of this youth delegation coming to South Africa to tell the world what was happening on this tiny island was the direct result of two gigantic and interconnected issues. Colonialism and racism. The Youth Commission unanimously agreed that the demilitarization of Vieques be included on the official youth declaration to the United Nations. Mari Nieves Alba. Vieques is a little island with 9,400 inhabitants. Most people didn't know what Vieques was.

In fact, most people didn't know what Puerto Rico was. Whatever the impact of the youth declaration is, the fact that Vieques is now in the consciousness of people all over the world is like an important first step towards something. On September 2, 2001, the official youth declaration was given to the U.N. Commissioner of Human Rights, Mary Robinson. Youth called for universal health care regardless of race and the implementation of anti-racist curricula beginning in grade school. For Latino USA, I'm Shirin Marisol Maragi in Durban, South Africa.

So first, that sounds just like you and also does not sound like you at all and also trying to sound like alicia keys yes there's something going on there i was about to clown you because you have this spoken word cadence happening you know i mean i was about to be the clown you was but it's a trip that you end that story talking about you know this call to implement anti-racist curricula starting elementary school, considering obviously that's a thing that a lot of people are talking about right now. And of course, you know, we just talked about the whole anti-critical race theory backlash, you know, from the right. And that's about sort of thinking through these big issues of race and racism and history and how that's taught. So yeah, a lot of stuff has changed, like your voice. And a lot of stuff has not.

And I've had so much deja vu, especially this past year and a half. I feel like this time that we found ourselves in, this most recent racial reckoning has just reminded me so much of what the racial justice activists I was covering 20 years ago were talking about. And for me, that fight, it really culminated in this global event where thousands of people came together from around the world to talk about how to end racism.

And, you know, I'm not one for nostalgia, but I cannot stop thinking about the World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa and how the world has changed and how I've changed. There she is. Hi. You haven't changed like for a day. You look exactly the same. My God. Oh, Jamil. I'm so happy to see you. I'm so happy to see you.

I'm so happy to see you. All right. Who is that we just heard? Who are you now? 20 years since I met you. Who am I now? I'm Jamil Kolantandika-Kroberga, 42 years old. I'm a filmmaker and I live in South Africa, Johannesburg, to be precise.

Jamil is a pretty famous director in South Africa these days. But when I met him, he was 22 years old. He was broke and he was trying to be a filmmaker. Right. And let's just go back to 2001. This was a period of huge technological change. Everything, everything was going digital at this time. And Jamil was a part of this wave of, you know, self-taught filmmakers. It was a digital filmmaking revolution.

And in 2001, the Indy Media Center was looking for young upstarts like him who knew the tech to cover the World Conference Against Racism. And he was like, sign me up. It was so fiery and there were so many angry groups who wanted to be represented. I was like, hmm, this is going to be a hell of a party. I have to go. So I hopped on the bus and I went to Durban. And a couple of days before the official start of the event, after I flew from San Francisco to China,

then again to Malaysia, where there was a 14-hour layover. That was the quickest way? What? No, I think it was the cheapest way, but man, my ticket was expensive, so I don't even know. Then I landed in Johannesburg, and then it was another seven-hour drive on the other side of the road to Durban. Anyway, not long after I get there, I realize my audio equipment doesn't work for whatever reason. And a disheveled, totally frustrated me walks into the Indy Media Center office

needing help. And there was Jamil. You weren't interested in video. You had audio issues. I remember that. So that has not changed. No, audio first, audio forever. and this is a story for a different time and i don't know if you can tell um by our banter but the second i met jamil jean

i was oh i was in love this is what i know about you. You like the boys, the boys like you. No, this is very special. I was so in love that Fidel Castro shows up at this conference. And I was studying the Cuban Revolution as a Raza Studies major at San Francisco State at the time. And I went. But I cannot recall any of it. Hey, do you remember what Fidel said in his speech? No, I don't.

I think I was just excited by the environment. I was so in love and infatuated with you that I don't remember. Likewise. Oh, don't heart eyes. So warning warning gene warning listeners uh my my nostalgia for this time is perhaps enhanced by love that kind of all-encompassing love that only 20-somethings have time for appreciate that disclaimer. Convention Center, every language you can imagine in the air. You know, these are the first time I'm hearing conversations about indigenous rights and sovereignty. I learned about the plight of the Roma people.

The Roma. I guess to explain the story, Kama, for the Roma people. The Roma trace their roots back to India. They're Europe's largest minority group. They've been discriminated against for hundreds of years. Yeah. And this is where I first was introduced to another group that's been discriminated against for a couple thousand years, the Dalits. Walking around, you met people from all over the place and they taught you so much. I remember

learning so much about the Indian caste system and how the caste system works. I didn't understand those politics at all. So people's young minds were being blown wide open, including Rosa Clementes. She was one of those Nuyorican activists I interviewed for that Latino USA story. And she's still an activist today. She's also an academic. She studies Afro-Latinx identity. And Rosa remembers how powerful it was to be at the World Conference Against Racism. You know, to see Colombians, Mexicans, Dominicans, Puerto Ricans, like, who were like, yeah, we're Black, was moving. So Rosa was in days of meetings in South Africa with hundreds of other young people drafting their version of the proposal to fight racism and reparations for the transatlantic

slave trade played a central role in those discussions and not just for the descendants of people enslaved in the united states but in latin america in brazil you know all over the caribbean yeah because most people forget that most of the 12 million Africans brought to the Americas during the transatlantic slave trade, they didn't end up in the United States. They actually ended up in South America and the Caribbean. And again, I must remind everyone, this and a nation that all deserved reparations for this crime against humanity. Rosa told me she thinks about that conference all the time, Jean. And I have to say, it felt good to know that it was just as memorable for her as it was for me. This message comes from WISE,

the app for doing things in other currencies. Send, spend, or receive money internationally and always get the real-time mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees. Download the WISE app today or visit wise.com. T's and C's apply. Support for NPR and the following message come from Carnegie Corporation of New York, working to reduce political polarization through philanthropic support for education, democracy, and peace.

More information at carnegie.org. If learning and love and being at the forefront of this huge moment of technological change that was disrupting journalism and it was disrupting all of media. If all that wasn't enough to make this remarkable to my 24-year-old self, Gene, my very favorite hip-hop artists were also in South Africa at the same time. That's bananas. They were there for this conference? They were there in conjunction with the conference. They were there for their own tour. It was called the Black August Tour.

Rosa Clemente actually helped organize it, too. She was doing double duty in South Africa. It was supposed to be a concert headlined by Lauryn Hill, who was huge at the time. But for reasons involving her not showing up to performances, that stopped being the case. We talk about things not changing. I mean, that has not changed at all. But, Jean, your favorite MC was there, Black Thought from The Roots. There was Jeru the Damaja, Dead Prez, Talib Kweli, and Boots Riley from The Coup. I think I actually only got to go because Lauryn Hill didn't go.

So as you can imagine, the Black August tour went from filling soccer stadiums to, you know, more modest venues. And that totally worked out for me because I got to see one of the best hip hop shows of my life. I could almost reach out and touch these artists, feel the sweat flying off them as they were performing. And what I loved is that they came with a message. You know, they were talking about pan-Africanism, ending mass incarceration and police brutality, freeing political prisoners, in Boots' case, dismantling capitalism because that's been his M.O. forever. And they held this big press event about their tour at the World Conference Against Racism.

Yeah, I mean, you know, we were there at that conference for only a few hours. We flew from Johannesburg to Durban just that day. And that day did not go the way he expected. Here's Jameel again. These were the conscious rappers of the time. And they came in i remember they a tent was put up for them to to basically have a press conference about why they're here and it just

turned on a crowd converged into this tent wait wait wait wait the crowd turned on all these rappers like what what happened there was a healthy amount of calling out going on, or as some people say now, calling in, going on at the conference. But, you know, face to face, not on Twitter, because that didn't exist at the time. And a bunch of young black South Africans came to that event and they spoke their minds. They were yelling things like, your shows are too expensive. Most of us can't afford to come. You talk about poverty, but you don't even know what poverty looks like. You're from a rich country. You wear brand name clothes. You wear fancy sunglasses. Look at you. You claim

you're down with Pan-Africanism, but you've only been to the continent, what, once? Maybe twice? It was a very intense situation to be in to witness all these rappers there's about cultural imperialism and capitalism also with that but they're also like rappers from the united states right like they're like they're centering like american perspectives in all these ways and it wasn't just the artists that were getting fired upon. It was everyone. Rosa Clemente, who was one of the concert organizers, you know, she was getting called in, too. All right, here we go. And at one point, somebody looked at me and was like, and you, you're a white girl.

Why are you here? And I was like, nah, homie, I'm Puerto Rican. And I showed him my tattoo of the Puerto Rican flag in the continent. I was like, no, I understand. I understand our privilege. Tell me what we are doing wrong. Rosa said they talked for a really long time and, you know, had a conversation that we're having right now, a conversation about light-skinned privilege, class privilege, country of origin privilege. People were debating all of that in the hallways and in the meeting

rooms and on the cricket field across the street. And, you know, to put all this into more context, the memories of apartheid are still fresh. It hasn't even been a decade since the struggle to bring it down. So the choice to have this conference in South Africa, that seems very intentional. Oh, it was. South Africa was picked by the United Nations to hold this conference in recognition of the sacrifice and the pain and the loss, everything it took to end apartheid. Boots told me he remembers someone at that press event say, My parents were tortured and killed by the police for being involved in the struggle. What do you have to tell me?

Somebody, maybe it was J. Rue, was saying something like, look, I live in Brooklyn. We got, was saying something like, look, I live in Brooklyn. We got the same struggles, blah, blah, blah. And I understand where he was coming from was more like a same struggle, same fight. And that just enraged the audience. The only thing that stopped it was the quick thinking of M1 from Dead Prez, who quickly wrote on a big piece of cardboard, Fuck the United States, and raised it up. I should start by saying that the United States never truly supported the holding of this conference.

That's Craig Keel. He was the U.S. Consul General in Durban, South Africa in 2001. Before he went into the Foreign Service, Gene, you know, a little bio of him, he was an actor in New York City off, off Broadway, he told me. And before that, he was protesting the Vietnam War. When I joined the Foreign Service, I told the security person who interviewed me that I had this FBI file, about 52 pages. And I said, is that a problem? And he said, look, if we rejected everyone who protested the Vietnam War, we wouldn't have anyone in the Foreign Service. 18 years after he landed his first job in the Foreign Service, he is in Durban. And naturally, he's involved with preparations for the conference. He attends most of the U.N. preparatory meetings where, like he said, the United States government was not on board.

What does that mean that the U.S. government wasn't on board? He said the U.S. never truly supported the holding of this conference. So we're going to get into some diplomat speak here, but he said the U.S. government felt that there was already international law that protected groups against discrimination, like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. But even more important, as far as legality is concerned, is the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which is, in fact, a treaty ratified by countries after it was adopted by the UN. And the United States is a party to that treaty. And that treaty, as well as the Universal Declaration, essentially oblige countries

not to discriminate. So, okay, the US government, and this was the George W. Bush administration at the time. Yeah. They're saying, this is a waste of our time because we already have international laws that address racism. Yeah. Craig also added that the U.S. wasn't down with two very specific issues that were tops on the agenda. Reparations for slavery and other discrimination and the question of Zionism as racism.

Zionism had been declared to be racism by the UN General Assembly in the mid-70s. And in 1991, the U.S. delegation succeeded in getting that repealed, the U.S. delegation in Israel. Here I am, 2021. I'm in the middle of my journalism career. It's 20 years after covering this global conference. And these are issues that we're still talking about. Reparations for slavery, Palestinian sovereignty. And as Craig put it, you know, the question of Zionism as racism. Yeah, like all those things have been in the news this summer, right? Yeah. So what did the United States government end up doing if they were so mad about, you know what I mean, this whole conference and how this was all happening? They snubbed the conference in a way. They sent a lower level delegation. They didn't send the brass.

There was this strong, strong expectation that the secretary of state would show up. So at the time, we're talking about Colin Powell. You know your politics, even though you were quite young at that time. Good on you, Gene. Colin Powell was the first black secretary of state, and he didn't show up to represent the United States, which, you know, made a lot of people mad. And Craig Keel told me it made African leaders in particular very upset. They were not pleased. And Craig said neither was he.

I was secretly hoping that Colin Powell would come. I didn't have any way to express that other than to, you know, say it privately to other members of the U.S. delegation. So I'm really curious as to what Colin Powell's calculation was then. I'm curious about what he would say about all this today. Yes. Well, we reached out to him. We asked him for an interview and we were told that he didn't have time to talk to us about this so so listening to this it makes even more sense you know that a sign saying fuck the united states might calm down might win over yeah angry crowd at this conference yeah because people were furious with the united states there was was a lot of anti-American sentiment in the air.

I remember feeling like I had to explain that, you know, my father's from Iran. My mom is Puerto Rican. Yes, I'm American. It's complicated. I just felt like I wanted to distance myself from my Americanness the whole time I was there. So people were side-eyeing you. They were, you know, you were feeling that friction because you were American. Oh, yeah.

I think that everybody at the conference who was American felt that way or felt like they had to explain themselves in some way. Right. And Craig told me he understood so much of the frustration and where it was coming from, especially over the Colin Powell, you know, not showing up situation. But on the topic of Israel, Craig said he didn't think it was fair that one country was being singled out for behavior that so many other nations that were there also engage in. It ended up, by the way, that the United States and the Israeli delegations left the conference before it was over. Days before, in fact. The United States no longer is represented at the World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa. The mid-level U.S. delegation left in protest over attempts to portray Israel as a

racist state. The conference itself wrapped five days later on September 8th. And, you know, there's this official document that comes out of it, and it's full of all this convoluted-sounding diplomat-ese or legalese. There was nothing in it that, like, mandates reparations for slavery, for example. But it urges member states to come up with ways, quote, for victims to seek redress for racism. There's no references to Zionism as racism or Israel as a racist state. The document instead calls upon member states to, quote, recognize the need to counter anti-Semitism, anti-Arabism, and Islamophobia worldwide, and urges all states to take effective measures to prevent the emergence of movements based on racism and discriminatory ideas concerning these communities. You know, all that to say, that was my very first contact at 24

with terms like anti-Arabism and Islamophobia. You know, Islamophobia is something we hear all the time now, but anti-Arabism, I don't think we've ever used that on a close switch. First time I've ever heard it. Maybe because Islamophobia might have actually subsumed it, like, because Islamophobia official and sort of, like, person-to-person

is directed at all sorts of people who are just assumed to be Muslim, right? That's Arabs, people of Middle Eastern, North African descent, the South Asians, right? Like, maybe Islamophobia just covers it all.

Yeah, that makes sense to me. Like I said, I'm this 24-year-old. I'm soaking up so much. I'm making all of these connections between racism here in the United States and racism abroad. It was such a transformative experience. And it felt like, and granted, I'm setting aside the boring legalese of that declaration, it really did feel like change was on its way. Three days after the conference was over, Rosa Clemente was on her way home from South Africa to New York City. We were in the air and saw that first plane hit the tower.

That's when we were starting to descend and the pilot was like, I need everybody to stay calm. Rosa Clemente, you all heard her voice right before the break. Just to remind you, she was a youth delegate at the conference. She helped organize the Black August Hip Hop Tour. So as you can imagine, as much as these events were energizing and amazing, they were also incredibly exhausting. And Rosa was going to stay longer in South Africa. But when the conference wrapped, just like a couple days after it wrapped, she was like, I got to go home. So she booked herself an earlier flight out of South Africa that was scheduled to land at JFK Airport on the morning of September 11th. We were in the air and saw that first plane hit the tower. That's when we

were starting to descend. And the pilot was like, I need everybody to stay calm, you know, of what you just saw. People just were gasped and like, what is happening? Then we're like, are we landing? What's going on? Like, and when we landed, it was mass chaos at the airport. And I just remember, I guess I had a cell phone and my dad was like, I'm here. I'm not parking the car. Come out right now. Leave your luggage. Shereen, where were you on September 11th? I was still in South Africa. Huh. I think my flight was scheduled to leave maybe on the 12th, but obviously that did not happen.

Right. Because the U.S. government grounded all flights across the country, yeah? So I was in Johannesburg. I had gone from Durban to Johannesburg at that point. I was with Jamil at the time. We were in a corner store, some sort of convenience store, and I remember the radio being on in the store really loud. And it was playing President Bush's press conference that he had like right after the

event. And I'm just like frozen in the aisle listening. I have spoken to the vice president, to the governor of New York, to the director of the FBI, and I've ordered that the full resources of the federal government go to help the victims and their families and to conduct a full-scale investigation to hunt down and to find those folks who committed this act. Terrorism against our nation will not stand.

And now if you join me in a moment of silence. I felt numb. I remember people around me saying some version of the chickens had come home to roost and, you know, the U.S. got what it deserved. I remember hearing that. And I honestly, I did not know how to think or how to feel in that moment. Yeah.

What about you? Where were you? I was in Long Island at Hofstra University when I was an undergrad. One of the big salient things I remember about that day was that it was perfect. It was breezy. There wasn't a cloud in the sky. And so from the top floor of my dorm building, you could see Manhattan. So we were watching this giant plume of smoke.

And my friend Alyssa and I were watching. We just watched it all unfold. Peter Jennings was narrating as all this stuff was happening. And there were so many people up on the top floor watching the communal television. And every couple hours you were a fighter jet fly over campus because we're that close to Manhattan. It was just a very surreal experience. Yeah. And for me, after the 9-11 news, the World Conference Against Racism felt surreal. It felt like it was something I made up.

It felt like a dream. Frankly, when the conference was over and then 9-11 happened, I never looked back. That's Craig Keeligan, the U.S. Consul General in Durban back in 2001. He told me he actually took a sick day because the drama of the conference and all the anti-American sentiment and everything, that stress had really taken a toll on him. So he was home when he learned about the planes hitting the World Trade Center. I didn't hear one bad word about the United States for weeks. And flowers, and we had a condolence book in the lobby of our consulate building, and people came and signed phone calls and so forth. And then we bombed Afghanistan, and things turned on a dime.

Within a few days, I got a call from the embassy, the security office, said, you've got to move out of residence right now. And I said, why? And he said, well, I can't say anything on the phone, but there's been a credible threat against your life. You know, Gene, Lutz Riley told me he also didn't have time to think about South Africa or the Black August tour or the World Conference

because after the World Trade Center attack, he was also dealing with death threats, but for very different reasons than Craig Keel. Yes, I remember all this drama over the Coos album cover from that time. Yeah. We had this album Party Music, and I wanted to have an album that showed that our music was destroying

capitalism. And somebody had the idea, like, let's have you there with a drum machine and the White House blowing up. But I was like, one, the White House blowing up is a cliche. Like it's used all the time. Two, I don't think the White House is the seat of power. So, you know, we went to Wall Street and that didn't seem like recognizable to most people. But people recognize the World Trade Center.

So we took a picture in front of it where I have a bass tuner and my DJ, Pam, the functious has conductors wands. And behind us. Is the World Trade Center blowing up? yeah i almost want to suggest y'all like google the yes google the album cover um for party music because it's like so on the nose that you would almost think that they made it after 9-11 like even where the smoke is happening yeah exactly, exactly. Where the explosions are. Like the part of the World Trade Center that is blowing up in that photo. Yeah. Oh, man. And, you know, Gene Boots argued to keep that cover. Wow.

After the attack, he obviously lost that fight. But he was also asked to put out an apology for the cover. And he was like, I'm not going to apologize for it, but I will put out a statement. And he did. And in the statement, he basically said, yes, this is a horrible atrocity. But it also needs to be put in the context of all of the other atrocities that the U.S. government supported, where thousands of innocent people died in places like Central America. And then I also said, with all the flag waving going on, there will be no one allowed in our shows wearing the combination of colors red, white, and blue.

Hmm. To be that outspoken at that time in the climate that we were in was rare. But whenever and wherever Boots could, you know, at his concerts, on TV, in magazine interviews, he was saying that he was against bombing Afghanistan and later the invasion of Iraq. He was against the war.

He would say all the time, no war for oil. It's wild that just in the last three or four weeks, the United States is pulling out of that part of this war, right? And so we are still dealing with the ramifications of the decisions to go into Afghanistan and Iraq after 9-11. I stayed behind in South Africa with Jamil for what felt like a couple of weeks, but I have no idea how long I was really there. I spent so much of that time being glued to the television. And we have unconfirmed reports this morning that a plane has crashed into one of the towers. Oh my God. That looks like a second plane. Administration officials say early evidence

points to the Saudi-born militant Osama bin Laden. We will find those who did it. We will smoke them out of their holes. We'll get them running and we'll bring them to justice. Everything, everything felt different. It felt heavy. And I just, I wanted to go home. Yeah, it was, it felt so big. I remember, you know, classes were canceled and it was a whole lot of like anxiety about what happens next. And, you know, being in the New York area area there was this like valorization of firefighters in the police department right yeah and also this other thing was happening people arguing against these military invasions of afghanistan and iraq and so it was really interesting to be in new york because new york kind of felt like this epicenter of it right there was all of this yeah this way that it was like

very personal to people and of course like new New York City eventually created this anti-terrorism task force that became part of the NYPD, which ended up surveilling Muslims and Queens and Brooklyn. There were global ramifications for all this, but in New York, I felt like there were just very local consequences. It sounds like you felt very connected to the event. I felt incredibly disconnected. I was 9,000 miles away when it happened. And I live 3,000 miles away across the country in the Bay Area. And I remember getting off the plane, being home and needing to clear my head. And one of the first things I did was take a walk

in San Francisco's Dolores Park, which is a beautiful park on a hill. And I was so shocked by the graffiti that I saw written on the concrete, on these concrete steps, that I went and I bought a disposable camera because I just had to capture the graffiti. What did the graffiti say? It said, bomb Arabs in big black letters, like over and over again, bomb Arabs. And I got the film developed and it was a terrible photo.

It came out blurry, but I've held onto that photo for 20 years because I guess I needed proof that this was the nightmare that I was stepping back into after this dream of an experience, you know, that was my time in South Africa before all this happened. Here's Rosa again. A conference of endless possibilities of reckoning against slavery and white supremacy and all this. And then 9-11, and I just remember that day like, everything we did is never going to happen.

And Jamil. You know, now we live in a quote-unquote woke world. But dare I say, in 2001, at that conference, I felt a real hope for the world. And literally, I felt 9-11 just snuffed it all out. Anyone's struggle that was being brought to the fore, it just, yeah, it just disappeared. Shereen, you started this whole conversation by saying

that you've been thinking a lot about, you know, how the world has changed since this moment. And I mean, the list of ways in which it's changed is almost endless. Like our privacy and civil liberties have been encroached upon. And like that's been codified, especially if you are a Muslim person or a person who is, you know, assumed to be Muslim living in the U.S. Police departments became more militarized because of 9-11. So, so much has changed. But you said this also made you think about how you personally have changed in the two decades since you filed that story about the conference.

Yeah. And in some ways, some big ways, I've changed for the better. I am a lot more confident in my abilities. I have a much deeper understanding of how race and racism work, especially here in the United States. I'm really proud of what we've been able to do here on Code Switch and what we've built. And what makes us unique is that we talk about race and who's raced in this country in a way that goes beyond black and white. We get into these gray areas. And obviously the black and white dynamic in this country is central.

It's foundational. But I think we've created this space where we can come together and talk about how the system of white supremacy affects all of us, but in very different ways. But there was something about that 24-year-old that I want to resurrect. I want to let myself think in broader, more expansive ways, even broader, even more expansive. I want to talk about these issues beyond our borders.

The person I was at 24, she had what Zen Buddhists call a beginner's mind. And she was so open and curious about the entire world. And I miss her. I just, I miss her. And I really want to find her again. All right, Tareen, one last time. Aw.

Let's do the credits. I just got emotional. We're going to make it. We're going to make it. All right, y'all. That is our show. As always, we want to hear from you. You can follow us on Twitter and IG.

We're at NPR Code Switch on both of those platforms. You can subscribe to the newsletter at npr.org slash codeswitch slash newsletter. You can send us an email, if that's more your jam, at codeswitch at NPR.org slash code switch slash newsletter. You can send us an email. That's more your jam at code switch at NPR.org. And if you haven't followed me yet on Twitter, I'm at Radio Mirage. Do it. This may be your last opportunity. No, it won't.

This episode was produced by Christina Kala and me. It was edited by Leah Dinella. And a shout out to the rest of the Code Switch familia. Karen Grigsby-Bates, Kumari Devarajan, Jess Kong, Alyssa Jung-Perry. I don't think I'm going to get through this. Alyssa Jung-Perry, Natalie Escobar, Sam Yellow Horse Kessler Carmen Molina Acosta and Steve Drummond our art director is LA Johnson

I am Shereen Marisol Maragi you are and you are I'm Gene Demby yes Gene Demby be easy y'all be easy Shereen thank you

peace be easy y'all be easy sharon thank you peace a special thanks to our funder the john d D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, for helping to support this podcast. Support for NPR and the following message come from the Kauffman Foundation, providing access to opportunities that help people achieve financial stability, upward mobility, and economic prosperity, regardless of race, gender, or geography. Kauffman.org.