It is a theme I love to treat this one.
I had three correspondents in NYC and the day of 9/11 I lived a real nightmare because I didn't still know if they were all safe.

That terrorist attack was for all of us a sort of before and after.

We understood someone launched an unclear war with hidden soldiers: phantom ones ready to sacrifice their lives for destroying our Western civilization and many poor innocent human beings. A dirty war.
It was more than clear that our old world would have changed forever. Like also our destiny.

This one is a book that wants to let us discover the other face of that post-terrorist attack; the most hidden part of it, the one no one speak about too much: what happened in the immediate in the Muslim communities located in the USA and interacting with the rest of people mainly white ones.
We speak of South Asians, Arabs and Afghan Americans.
The discrimination they lived because of this terrorist attack and diffidence they experienced but also their fight for being considered well and not included in the spiral of diffidence created and wanted by terrorists.
What did they start to be? Activists, rising their voices against discrimination, fighting for human rights of every sorta.

The 9/11 Generation Youth, Rights, and Solidarity in the War on Terror  by Sunaina Marr Maira published recently by New York University Press starts the trip in the democratic California in a place like the Silicon Valley for brains arriving from every part of the world.

The Silicon Valley and San Jose are places populated by open minded minds but where, young people from the ethnic groups said before experienced psychological violence, verbal violence, after 9/11 in particular if they were undocumented citizens just for the fact of being of the same ethnic group or religion of the terrorists. And sometimes not just verbal.

The answer the creation of an activist movement in grade to speak internally and externally at the USA.
Why this?

Because young people understood first of all that it was necessary  sharing a best knowledge of their communities, their religion and their customs in the USA and with the other Americans, although they were ready to fight and promote their activism outside as well.

It's a very interesting book. It speaks at the mind and heart of everyone and again this one another book reporting of communities and ethnic groups fighting in the USA for their Rights and the rights of an entire, wounded humanity devastated by hate, diffidence, racism and persecution.


Highly recommended.


I thank NYU Press for the physical copy of this book.


Anna Maria Polidori