When Bonnie Greer returned to America to talk to the people she grew up with, she came across a different set of attitudes towards the events of 11 September
by Bonnie Greer

African America knows something about the ugly face America presents to the world. To friends here in Britain I always say that if you don't like American foreign policy, try American domestic policy. Try being an American citizen with the full backing of the constitution yet by word and deed having to feel like an outsider.

It took me years in Britain to adjust to being called 'American' and 'Yank'. I had never felt like one in the land of my birth. Yet to hear intelligent people condemn America, even say it got what was coming to it on 11 September, makes me want to yell 'Which America are you talking about? Not mine!'

I took an Oath Of Allegiance because swearing loyalty, not to the people but to the Crown, is what enabled me to become a British citizen. If an oath is necessary, it should be required of everyone, native or non-native.

After 11 September, the world was left with the image of an America shaking with fear, demoralized and waking up to a new reality.

I thought that the people I saw on television that day - staring wide-eyed into the cameras, crying, 'Why do they hate us? I don't understand' - reflected the mood of the nation, a country perplexed and bewildered. I wanted to go home and embrace them, as you do small children when they discover that their beloved daddy is the Don and the hit that their house just took was from his enemies.

But upon returning home to make a film about what we call '911', I discovered another America, an unreported America where fear is an everyday occurrence and 11 September terrible but inevitable. I returned to my roots, ethnic America. It's another story there.

James Baldwin wrote his novel Another Country in 1962. This other country is a parallel land that exists alongside what the rest of the world understands as the United States. This country, my country, is seldom visited, seldom consulted, seldom reported upon by the powers that be except when it disrupts, when it disturbs the 'real' country it mirrors. Its citizens are shadows, creatures glanced out of car windows, over the shoulder, tolerated, feared, despised. We are a problem, an 'issue', a thing to confront, to adjust, and when necessary to quell back into our invisibility.

I went back to talk to the people I came from - my family and friends, all of them working class and lower-middle class black and Muslim people. They, too, were shaken by what had happened, but here's the difference: while they did not condone in any way what happened, they clearly understood how it could have happened. They could see what could have led to mass murder on a cloudless September morning.

Because they are citizens of 'another country', they were able to enter into the mind of Mohamed Atta and his cohorts. Unlike the majority of Americans, Euro-Americans, some of them could even put themselves in the pilot's seat.

I can remember reading a book about African Americans in World War Two. There was a story about a black man, who after hearing about Pearl Harbor, ran through the streets shouting: 'The colored folks got 'em. The colored folks got 'em!' There were frantic but secret efforts in the early days of the war to ensure that black people were on side.

Roosevelt knew that segregation had created bitter opposition to whatever the majority upheld. Eleanor Roosevelt was enlisted to make sure black people were heard. The situation was so potentially explosive that A. Philip Randolph, a staunch patriot, and leader of the Union of Sleeping Car Porters, an organization for black railmen, threatened to march on Washington in 1941. This would have been a propaganda coup for Nazi Germany, already pinpointing black servicemen and asking them the question: 'With segregation at home, who are you fighting for?'

The irony was that African Americans were among the first to sign up, utterly loyal. Yet it wasn't until the Battle of the Bulge in late 1944 that black men en masse were armed. This was only after a substantial number of white soldiers had died.

Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan is a movie that I still cannot see. My late father was at the beach landings, but you won't see him or anyone like him in the film - nor in the Spielberg follow-up, Band Of Brothers. As a black man, he was only allowed to supply the fighters. He could not bear arms in a war-zone except in an emergency. Driving back to Normandy with him 50 years later, he had flashbacks. He had to maneuver the roads back then in the dark with no lights.

Muhammad Ali's retort as to why he was not going to fight in Vietnam ('No Vietcong ever called me a nigger') is the point that ethnic America tries to make in relation to the 'war against terrorism'. But no one is listening.

One of my Chicago friends, Fadwa, explained to me that the Islam the world rails against is, from her point of view, a product of the particular culture that it exists in. She, as a Muslim woman, never feels restricted. Her friends, who wear traditional clothing, never feel restricted. She sees no contradiction in being a good Muslim and a proud American. But who, among our leaders, wants to hear from her?

The salon where she works is owned by Mohamed, an Egyptian-American. His clients are mainly African-American, about 500 of them. On the day of the attack, 100 of them crowded inside, determined to protect him.

In the back of the shop, while Mohamed was going through many stages - anger, denial, shock, hurt - his wife, a black woman, and her friends made sure that no patriotic firebombs destroyed what he had spent two decades building.

A black woman, a working single mother, told me that if she could say 'sorry' to the Muslim world, she would. I almost burst into tears. That this woman who worked at two jobs and went to college in the evening to better herself, felt she could apologize for America's actions, while Donald Rumsfeld and his ilk do not, showed clearly to me that the divide is stronger, is bigger than ever.

Ethnic America, like ethnic Britain, doesn't count when it comes to what Americans call 'the real deal'. We are treated as women have always complained they are treated - shunted into the background and told to keep quiet while the men go out and do what the men gotta do.

Until that other country that Baldwin wrote about is accepted as real and legitimate, its citizens respected as capable human beings, and allowed to live in peace, Baldwin's 'another country' will continue to look at Ground Zero and see not rubble, but chickens coming home to roost.

· Bonnie Greer's documentary 'Letter from America', in the Correspondent series, can be seen tonight on BBC2 at 7.15pm.

© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2001

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