Twenty-five years ago today, the attacks of September 11 changed the lives of millions of people. I was personally affected by 9/11, and this anniversary has never been abstract for me. I carry grief for the people who died that day, for the people who love them, and for everyone whose life was divided into a before and an after. I also carry the grief of a lost country.

What I have been thinking about today, though, is not only what happened on September 11. I have been thinking about what a country does after rupture—what it builds out of fear, what capacities it gives its institutions, what communities are made to absorb the consequences, and what becomes possible years later because those choices were made. I have also been thinking about the other side of that story: what happens when communities are forced, over generations, to spend more and more of their own capacity surviving the conditions around them.

The United States before September 11 was already a country shaped by profound injustice, violence, and exclusion. What I grieve is also the possibility of what we might have become. In the immediate aftermath of September 11, the vulnerability of our lives became visible to us in a new way. So did our interdependence. For a moment, we had an opportunity to understand how deeply we needed one another and how profoundly our lives here were connected to the lives of people elsewhere.

Instead, fear became one of the ways we organized ourselves. The years that followed brought war, surveillance, suspicion, an enormous expansion of state power, and the targeting of Muslim, Arab, South Asian, immigrant, and other communities. Practices developed through the language of emergency became increasingly ordinary parts of American life. Surveillance, detention, militarized enforcement, and the treatment of entire groups of people as potential threats became capacities our institutions learned how to use and retain.

Latino and Latin American immigrant communities were enfolded into that response too. We were rarely the stated target of the post-9/11 security response, but phenotype, language, immigration status, and the broadening association between foreignness and danger meant that many of our communities were caught inside the machinery being built. We became, in many ways, collateral damage to a response ostensibly directed elsewhere. Immigration enforcement expanded, the distinction between migration and national security thinned, and people whose lives had little relationship to the attacks found themselves living with the consequences of the institutions and practices created in their aftermath.

Twenty-five years later, the relationship has changed again. Latino and Latin American immigrant communities are now living through an extraordinary period of targeting and persecution in which the targeting itself is increasingly open, explicit, and supported through the official power of government. Families organize ordinary life around the possibility that someone they love could be detained or removed. Enforcement reaches into workplaces, neighborhoods, courthouses, and communities, while the reach of US immigration policy increasingly extends across the hemisphere. For those of us whose lives and relationships stretch across the Americas, what is happening becomes much larger than an immigration debate. We are watching the relationship between the United States and the peoples of this hemisphere being reorganized before us.

This is part of why I have been thinking so much today about the dedication to What You Are Asked to Carry. I wrote it because I wanted to make visible a relationship that we were taught to experience as a series of unrelated histories. During the 1980s, the United States worked across Central America to prevent popular, working-class, and left-aligned movements from gaining power. The consequences included war, displacement, assassinations, the destruction of unions and peasant movements, economic destabilization, and extraordinary violence against Mayan communities. At the same time, cocaine moved through networks connected to the Contra war and into US cities, devastating Black communities whose lives would then be reshaped further through policing and incarceration.

We learned to call one of these things foreign policy and the other drugs and crime. We learned to locate one in Central America and the other in Black neighborhoods in the United States. That separation made it much harder to understand that people across these places were absorbing consequences produced through the same period of US political activity.

What I understand more clearly now is that the relationship went further than shared suffering.

Black communities in the United States have carried one of this country's strongest traditions of resistance to racism, militarism, colonialism, and abuses of state power. Black churches, organizers, intellectuals, civic institutions, political leaders, and movement networks helped build a political culture capable of understanding that struggles for freedom here were connected to struggles for liberation elsewhere. That capacity was visible in the civil rights movement, in opposition to war and colonialism, in solidarity with movements across Africa and Latin America, and powerfully in the struggle against apartheid.

When Black communities were subjected to economic abandonment, drugs, violence, policing, incarceration, and the immense work of keeping families and communities alive, the consequences traveled far beyond those communities. Enormous relational, organizational, political, and human capacity was required simply to hold life together. Communities that had carried some of this country's strongest traditions of international solidarity continued creating, organizing, resisting, and surviving, while having to devote more and more of their capacity to conditions created around them. The larger movement ecology felt that pressure too.

I think we lost something collectively through the sustained pressure placed on Black communities. The country had relied, often without recognizing it, on Black communities as a source of political imagination, organizing infrastructure, moral clarity, internationalism, and resistance to abuses of power. As more of that capacity was required to protect life at home, less of it was available to sustain relationships of solidarity elsewhere. Something therefore became less available to communities beyond our borders too: relationships, organizing capacity, political pressure, and protection inside this country.

This is one reason I keep thinking about the period after the anti-apartheid movement. We have continued to see extraordinary moments of protest, resistance, and mass mobilization. What has been harder to sustain is the same depth of international solidarity infrastructure across communities and institutions. I increasingly wonder how much of that loss is connected to what Black communities were forced to carry over those same decades, and to the extraordinary amount of political, relational, institutional, and human capacity that had to be turned toward keeping communities and families intact.

What a community is forced to carry changes what becomes possible for everyone around it.

Institutions accumulate capacity over time. Communities can be forced to spend theirs under sustained pressure. That asymmetry matters. The state can carry surveillance, detention, enforcement, and coercive practices forward from one crisis into the next, while communities asked to absorb repeated forms of harm have less room to sustain the relationships, movements, and institutions through which people protect one another.

That is what I mean when I say our suffering was linked.

And I think the opposite is also true. Our capacity to survive, resist, protect one another, and create something different is linked too.

The targeting of Muslim and Arab communities after September 11, the collateral consequences absorbed by Latino and Latin American immigrant communities in that same period, the long pressure placed on Black communities through criminalization and incarceration, and the open persecution of Latino and Latin American immigrant communities today each have their own histories and require their own precision. At the same time, we have to become capable of recognizing what happens when a society repeatedly permits one group of people to be isolated from everyone else.

We have to learn to recognize one another before the machinery reaches us.

Unity across difference means much more to me than agreement or sameness. It is the capacity to understand that we need people whose lives, histories, beliefs, and experiences differ from our own. It is the capacity to recognize that the strength of another community may someday become part of our own ability to survive, resist, rebuild, or imagine something different. When another community is forced to spend more and more of its capacity on survival, all of us may lose capacities we do not yet realize we depend upon.

This is why I keep returning to the question: Who will we US citizens be?

I carry the grief of a country I have lost. I also carry responsibility for the country we are still capable of becoming. September 11 taught me how quickly a life can change. The twenty-five years since have taught me how quickly a country can change, how fear can reorganize our relationships, and how what one community is forced to carry can diminish possibilities for many others.

Today I am remembering the people whose lives were taken twenty-five years ago, the people whose lives were forever changed, and the possibility of a country capable of understanding that our lives truly belong in relationship with one another.

I ended the dedication to What You Are Asked to Carry with two sentences:

“Our suffering was linked. Our survival has been, too.”

Twenty-five years after September 11, I understand those words differently.

Our survival will be, too.