 So up next, I would like to introduce Mustafa Bayoumi. Dr. Mustafa is a professor at Brooklyn College. He is the author of How Does It Feel to be a Problem, Being Young in Arab in America, which traces the experiences of seven young Arab-Americans navigating life in post-September 11th environment, where complicated public perceptions of the attacks gave birth to new brands of stereotypes fueling widespread discrimination. He's also the author of This American Muslim Life, which discusses surveillance and profiling during the war on terror. Take it away. Thank you, Emily, and really a big thanks to everybody who was involved in organizing this today and for inviting me. It's really an honor to be here on such a day. For me, this is a difficult day for me. I live in New York City. I was in New York City 20 years ago. I remember it like it was yesterday. In fact, the last 20 years in this terrible way feel like they have been just one long day, a day full of grieving, a day full of misery, a day full of endless warfare, as we've been hearing about, and also a day, I think, of hope and lost hope. And I think I want to talk a little bit about that today. One of the things that struck me having lived through the experience of being in New York City at the time, I mean, millions of people were like that, too. But I think it's kind of been forgotten what New York City felt like during the attack. For one thing, there were the sensory emotions, for sure. There was a smell in the air. There was the visual markers. You could see the plumes of smoke from the attacks. It was very, very powerful. And it was very, very sad. The whole city was enveloped in a kind of collective sadness that meant that it was a movement towards working for a better world. There was, in fact, in my recollection, in the very early days following the attacks of 9-11, unlike the rest of the nation, in New York City, there was no appetite, generally speaking, for war. And there was something really powerful about those first few days. Unfortunately, they didn't last very long. And what happened is something that we've been hearing about powerfully this afternoon as well. That's everywhere from the run up to the war in Afghanistan. I recall very clearly when George W. Bush came and spoke like a sheriff at the World Trade Center site and promised vengeance. Just as I remember the run up to the war in Iraq, and from all of those events, whether it's the attacks from 9-11, the run up to the war in Afghanistan, the run up to the war in Iraq, following the war in Iraq, until today, what we've seen is elevated hostility and a lot of hate that has been directed towards Arab Americans, towards Muslim Americans, and towards all kinds of people who are presumed to be Arab or Muslim. And in a lot of ways, what I think one way of thinking about it is that we've encountered two kinds of hatred, two kinds of hostility our communities have. One, I would say, are hate crimes from the general public. The other, I would say, are state crimes from the government itself. And right after 9-11, we actually had a slew of both, nationally speaking. There was some in New York City as well, but certainly that was also the case nationwide. Hate crimes soared about 1,800% in the first six months following 9-11. But also less attention has been paid, generally speaking, I think, to the state crimes, especially from that same period. There were these massive sweep arrests that immediately followed 9-11. I don't know if anybody recalls, but then Attorney General John Ashcroft used to get up in front of the TV and say, today we arrested 762 possible terrorists and the assumption between being an immigrant, especially a brown immigrant, especially a brown immigrant from a Muslim country and being a terrorist, was cemented in the public's imagination by these kinds of state crimes. And then, of course, we had things like the special registration program. We had all kinds of ways in which spies and informants from different levels of law enforcement agencies infiltrated into the Muslim-American communities around the country. All of these things reflected in back in TV programs. And then the public consciousness is formed by both elements of the TV programs and by what the government is doing. It illustrates this feedback loop of this dangerous sense of hatred and othering that a lot of Arab and Muslims have had to live through since then. And, of course, it got even worse when we hit the 2015-2016 period when Donald Trump entered the national stage. And with Donald Trump, what happened, I think one way of thinking about what happened with Donald Trump is the previous administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama basically wanted to maintain the state's monopoly on violence. And so there was still a lot of state programs. And the state would say things to the effect of, hey, we're still taking care of you, you don't have to worry about it, namely taking care of you by this extra prosecution of Arab and Muslim communities. Well, Donald Trump tried to, in fact, I think bring the public hatred into his politics, instrumentalizing it through the bodies of Arabs and Muslims in this country. And then, as we saw later on, not only it was in fact of so many different communities, and that kind of corrosive politics is a legacy of our 9-11 era. I do wanna say one thing, though, because I don't wanna just end on these moments. I'd rather relate to you a story that I was lucky enough to hear. So earlier this year, I had a small project of going and writing five very brief accounts of people's lives, what they were like in that 9-11 period and after. And I was very fortunate to hear from one man in particular. His name is Rice Bouyan. And you may have heard of his story already, but if you'll indulge me just for two or three minutes, I'm gonna read you a very short summary of what happened to him in the post immediately following 9-11. It starts in 1999. In 1999, 24-year-old Rice Bouyan left a career in Bangladesh as an Air Force pilot and moved to America. From New York, he made his way to Dallas, Texas, jumping out of business opportunity while finishing his studies. There was, he had a friend who was reopening an old gas station there and they began the venture together. I was really excited, Rice told me. His new life in America was beginning. The station opened in June, 2001. And Rice found he liked the work and his customers. Then came the 9-11 attacks. Anti-Muslim slurs were common. Four days later, a Pakistani man was murdered less than a kilometer from his work. And then on September 21, a man walked into Rice's gas station store, asked him his origin, and shot him with a shotgun. I felt at first, he said to me, like a million bees stinging my face. And then I heard the explosion. I looked down and I saw blood pouring like an open faucet from the right side of my head. His military training helped save his life, but he also lost so much. Vision in one eye, his job, his apartment, his fiancee back home ended things. With no health insurance, no medical medical bills piled up. What he never lost was his faith in God. On October 4th, a man working in a nearby gas station was killed by the same shooter. Police arrested him on October 5th. At trial, the shooter was found guilty and sentenced to death. His motive, he said, was to kill Arabs in revenge for 9-11. Incidentally, no one he shot was Arab. Rice slowly rebuilt his life, relying on the kindness of others. Performing the hajj in 2009, he thought about his shooter sitting on death row waiting to die. Rice saw how revenge won't bring peace to any situation and began a global campaign to save the life of the man who shot him. In the end, the execution could not be prevented, but the two men spoke before his death. Later, the man's last words were, quote, hate is going on in this world and it has to stop. One second of hate will cause a lifetime of pain. Rice now runs his own NGO, his own non-governmental organization called A World Without Hate, centered on building empathy. Like him, it's a light illuminating our darkness. And I think Rice's story is so powerful, so important and it's still something that I wanna hang on to. I think that there are ways that we can work collectively as a human race, think of each other for each other. And to that end, I wanna think of this day as a day of opportunity, not just as a day for mourning and sadness. Thank you. Thank you so much for that incredible story and sharing your thoughts and perspective. That was great.