An African American and Caribbean Diaspora Lens on 9/11
Twenty-five years later, America still says, “Never forget.” I haven’t.
I was 25 years old on September 11, 2001, a young mother with two toddlers and a one-year-old son. That morning, I had just dropped my girls off at preschool. The television was on, as it almost always was. But that morning, the background noise changed: the inflections, the audible breaths, the pauses. Something was terribly wrong before I understood what had happened.
I gravitated toward the living room and froze at the sight of smoke pouring from the World Trade Center. Then, with the world, I watched the second plane hit. Whatever paralysis had held me broke. I grabbed my son, got in the car, and drove to get my girls. I wasn’t thinking about foreign policy or terrorism. There was only one thought: Get my children. Safe back home with me.
I remained glued to the television for hours, watching images that would become permanently embedded in our collective memory: the towers burning, people running, first responders moving toward danger, dust-covered strangers helping one another, the silence afterward. It was the wounding of our humanity through loss, bravery, and pain whose layers we are still discovering.
But now, twenty-five years later, I realize there are stories within the story that deserve exploring, about race, immigration, belonging, the African American community, the Caribbean diaspora, people who lived between nations and identities. People whose names were among the dead but whose cultural stories weren’t always included in how America remembered them. So when America says “Never forget,” I find myself asking: Whom are we remembering?
We Were There Too
Black stories were there. African American stories, Caribbean stories, immigrant stories. African Americans worked in those buildings. Black firefighters, police officers, medical professionals, and ordinary citizens became part of what unfolded. Across the Caribbean, mothers and fathers waited for word from loved ones who had left their islands to build lives in another country; some had migrated seeking opportunity, some had become citizens. They crossed water, built lives, went to work on an ordinary Tuesday, and some never came home.
National tragedies are often remembered through broad language: America was attacked, America mourned. But America is made of people, descendants of enslaved Africans, children of the Great Migration, Jamaicans, Haitians, Trinidadians, Guyanese, Saint Lucians, Dominicans, Cubans, Puerto Ricans, and more. They were not standing outside America’s story. We were already inside it.
More Than One Home
Those of us in the diaspora understand instinctively that home can exist in more than one place. You can carry Kingston in your heart while building a life in New York. Belonging doesn’t have to be either/or. And when tragedy strikes one home, the other home grieves too. That morning, Caribbean families thousands of miles away were staring at telephones, waiting to hear if someone they loved was safe, the same instinct that sent me racing for my children. Perhaps grief has always understood something our politics forget: human beings belong to one another.
The God Who Stood in the Rubble
This is what makes Ground Zero a theological space for me. God was present with the American mother and the Jamaican mother alike, with Christians who prayed, Muslims who grieved, and first responders moving into buildings while thousands fled. Scripture gives us a God whose presence is never restricted by nationality: “The Lord is near to the brokenhearted” (Psalm 34:18), not the American brokenhearted, or the black or white or documented brokenhearted. Simply the brokenhearted. And Scripture tells us this God “made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth” (Acts 17:26), so there was never a version of humanity that stood outside His reach. He was not present as the possession of one nation. He was the God of every nation at Ground Zero.
When Strangers Became Neighbors
Strangers helped strangers, gave blood, opened doors. For a moment, the categories that mattered on September 10 became small on September 11. Race and religion didn’t disappear, but suffering exposed our shared humanity underneath. That leaves a question I can’t escape: if 9/11 taught us how quickly strangers become neighbors in grief, what happened to that lesson? Fear became part of the story too. Muslims and those perceived to be Muslim faced suspicion they didn’t earn. Once fear starts categorizing people, the distance between stranger and enemy shrinks fast. Our grief cannot become permission to stop seeing someone else’s humanity.
What Did We Learn About the Stranger?
This is where remembrance moves beyond looking backward. It becomes spiritual examination. Throughout Scripture, hospitality is more than good manners; it reveals the character of God’s people. Abraham opened his tent to strangers. Lot opened his home. Jesus crossed boundaries repeatedly to encounter people others had learned to avoid, then wrapped Himself in a towel and washed feet. In Matthew 25, He made hospitality intensely personal: “I was a stranger and you welcomed me.” That verse is easy to embrace when the stranger is someone we already like. It becomes harder when the stranger looks different, speaks differently, prays differently, or belongs to a group someone has taught us to fear. Christian hospitality becomes most visible when welcome costs us something.
Who Gets to Belong?
For African Americans, belonging has always been complicated, a people who built, fought for, and died for this nation while still having to insist on their full belonging in it. Caribbean immigrants carry another accent, another history, into that same complicated experience. But the people who went to work on September 11 didn’t become part of America’s story only because they died in an American tragedy; they were already part of it: working, raising families, worshiping, dreaming, calling relatives back home. Behind words like immigrant and refugee are human beings hoping everyone they love makes it safe back home.
I’m Gonna Go Get My Children Home
I was 25 when I watched that plane strike the tower. My first response wasn’t sophisticated; it was maternal: Get my babies home. Twenty-five years later, I think there’s theology hidden in that instinct. Beneath every category we create to determine who belongs, human beings carry the same longing: we want the people we love safe, and we want them home.
Get my babies home. Twenty-five years later, I think there’s theology hidden in that instinct.
And maybe that longing gives us a small glimpse into the heart of Christ. Jesus promised, “I will come again, and receive you unto myself; that where I am, there ye may be also” (John 14:3). The Second Coming is not merely the conclusion of history; it is a gathering. A Savior returning for children who have been wounded, scattered, frightened, grieving, and separated far too long.
On September 11, 2001, everything in this young mother cried out, I need to go get my children and bring them home.
And perhaps, in the promise of His return, we can hear the heart of Jesus echoing that same determination:
I’m gonna go get My children home.
