On the 18th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, minorities in New York City remembered the day that changed their lives as Americans forever. 

Aamer Alam, a 24-year-old Brooklyn native who grew up in a Muslim family, recalled how his father, who was a first-hand witness of the 9/11 attacks, came home as a completely different person that very night.

“He was just not the same person anymore. I guess it might be PTSD, but he never got it checked out,” he said. “He used to be quite a caring dad, but afterwards he had extremely bad anger management issues and would often lash out at us.”

Alam and his brother both faced bullying at school.

“My brother’s teacher would refer to terrorists as my brother’s people,” he said. “My brother used to be a diligent student, but after regularly being picked on by his teacher, he didn’t want to stand out anymore and his grades became quite average, the bullying really affected him.” 

When he was in the sixth grade, Alam got into a fight with a classmate who called him Osama.

“It made me angry,” he said. “I didn’t want to be treated in the same way my brother was being treated. I knew it was wrong.”

His experiences were far too common. According to a report published in 2014 by the Sikh Coalition, more than 50% of Muslim children are bullied at schools, with the number rising to 67% for children who wear turbans. 

Alam said Muslim women in his community, including his mother, were afraid of wearing their Hijab out in public for years after 9/11. 

“We heard a lot about people forcefully taking Hijabs off women on the street, so my mum stopped wearing a Hijab to work,” he said. “She didn’t wear a hijab to job interviews just so that she could be taken more seriously. Even now, she would wear a hijab on the way to work, but not at work.”

Sandra Cabal, who has lived in New York for more than 32 years, remembered the reaction of her boyfriend at the time immediately after 9/11.

 “He wanted to join the Army, ‘We have to kill the people who killed us,’ he told me. I just couldn’t believe what he was saying,” she said. “Before 9/11 there was a stigma, but that was more towards Arabic people, but because people who attacked the World Trade Center did it in the name of a religion, it has bought the believers down with them.” 

Cabal said post-9/11 racial discrimination became more obvious to her. 

“Back in Colombia, where I am from, people think you’re extremely educated if you know a second language, but here it is not the case. If you speak two languages it is almost as if people see you as a lesser person,” she said.  “I live in the Bronx. I’ve lived there for 12 years now. Before that I lived in Brooklyn for 20 years, yet so many people still ask me where I am from because I look different and speak with an accent. But I am an American; I am a New Yorker.”

Cabal said discrimination is motivated by fear.

“People are afraid of people who are not like them, but I like being around different people because once you actually get to know them, you realize that everyone is much like one another.” 

Frank Kraemer, a 24-year-old African American man who grew up in Long Island,  said despite racism that still exists in the United States, things have improved. 

“I think [racism] comes from a place of misrepresentation or misunderstanding of another person’s religion and culture. It may not be an everyday thing, but it is common and it happens,” he said. “Honestly, I think it has become a lot better over the years.”

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When Finella Jarvis’s brother was arrested, he was sent to Rikers Island for months to await his trial before being transferred upstate. She panicked and worried about her brother’s safety. Jarvis knew Rikers Island to be a legal cage for human beings that devolves them into desperate animals.

“It was heart-wrenching because that’s my twin,” Jarvis, 31, from Canarsie, Brooklyn said. “So just imagine going to court dates and going to appeals and just waiting for your brother to be exonerated and to be released. It takes a huge toll on the family and unfortunately our mom passed away when he was in there.”

Jarvis and hundreds of protestors gathered on Steinway Street and 30^th Avenue in Astoria, Queens yesterday to urge the closing of Rikers Island. The protesters marched to Hazen Street and 19^th Avenue, the edge of the bridge to Rikers Island, chanting to free their sisters, brothers and friends.

Rikers Island has been heavily criticized over claims and reports of extreme violence among inmates and correctional officers, corruption among the officers and contraband being snuck onto the island. Most recently an officer who pled guilty for covering up and helping beat an inmate to death.

Jarvis’s brother was charged with a felony weapon charge. He was released this past December on appeal.

Rikers Island has a notorious reputation. Mayor Bill de Blasio says he is trying to reform the prison. His plan includes giving some correction officers stun guns  to help decrease violence and added mental health units. Glenn Martin, the founder and president of JustLeadershipUSA, an organization dedicated to cutting prison population, said that the reforms are like “lipstick on a pig.”

Jarvis said Rikers Island is too far gone for anything to help. She said the best solution is to close it down.

“Rikers needs to be shut down because it’s just a tool that just perpetuates the demise of the black, the Latino, and every underprivileged community” Jarvis said. “No one is being rehabilitated there.”

Jarvis’s brother graduated with a degree in Africana studies from Brooklyn College and is on his way to law school. But she knows there are not the same opportunities throughout every community.

“They’re people that made mistakes,” she said. “They come from communities that are underserved, underprivileged and they don’t have some of the opportunities that our white counterparts have.”

Jarvis said there needs to be more avenues for people to rehabilitate and learn from their mistakes instead of being branded a criminal and then having less opportunities than they did before.

Walter Rodriguez, 45, from Claremont, Bronx, works in the Bronx Defenders, a public defense organization for residents in the Bronx. He said he sees clients wait years in Rikers Island for their trial in “deplorable” and “dehumanizing” conditions.

“By closing Rikers, it could help expedite justice because then we’re not warehousing people,” he said. “It’s part of a broken down criminal justice system.”

Rodriguez said that getting a court room to open in the South Bronx takes so long and therefore his clients are forced to wait in Rikers Island. He said targeting these petty crimes and having people wait so long for a trial is a “funnel for criminalizing people and then bringing them into jails.”

Stephon Rose, 27, from Canarsie, Brooklyn said that these police tactics target minorities and low-income neighborhoods and once they have a criminal record, it’s almost impossible to come out of it. She said some of the laws are so obscure that not many people know about them.

“You’re treated like a hardcore criminal,” Rose said. “Whether you’re a murderer or you jump the turnstile.”

Rose said that detainees suffered emotional, mental and physical abuse as the cost of a small crimes. She said a resolution would be to provide education on these minor laws to make sure people don’t commit crimes they don’t know are against the law.

Protestors hold handmade signs draw attention to the faulty prison system at Rikers Island.. Hundreds of people of color marched yesterday to protest the condition at the jail. Rikers Island. Photo by Sophie Herbut.

Protestors held signs with shocking statistics on the population of Rikers, as well as the amount of money, $209,000, being channeled into every inmate.

“The statistics say that 89 percent of Rikers [detainees] are Latino and black,” said Rose. “That number is disgusting.”

Ironically, Rikers Island was named after Abraham Rycken, a slave owner.

“There’s no reason why African Americans and Latinos are still minorities, but they’re the majority in our city jail,” Jarvis said. “As a whole, as a community, everyone should be out here supporting this cause.”

Pooja Kumbri, 23, from Harlem said that the best way to address people who have committed crimes is through compassion and understanding.

“So many people there for crimes of poverty,” Kumbri said. “Which is a larger issue than the individual.”

As the rally approached its destination, police officers patrolled the barricade put up to prevent the protestors from crossing that point.

“It’s ironic to see so many corrections officers protecting the island as if we want to go to Rikers Island,” City Council member Daniel Drom pointed out to the now halted crowd.

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Lisa Nelson-Haynes looks out onto the streets of Philadelphia. Haynes has been the associate director at The Painted Bride for more than seven years and thinks African American artists deserve more coverage in the Philadelphia art community. Photo by Elizabeth Vulaj

PHILADELPHIA — When Sande Webster announced to the Philadelphia art world in 1968 that she was going to open a gallery that would feature black artists, she got a phone call from a gallery owner that shocked and infuriated her.

“She said to me, ‘I hear you have black artists in your gallery. You can’t do that. If black people come, white people will never come.’ I said, ‘You don’t even know who I am, how dare you talk to me like that, ” she recalled.

Webster slammed the phone down and embarked on her mission to bring coverage and attention of black artists’ work to the forefront of the Philadelphia art community.

The situation has improved considerably for black artists since the civil rights movement in the 1960s, but a majority of them believe their work is undervalued, she said. Webster and other gallery owners said that deep-rooted racism still pulses through the city. According to Webster, her gallery, Bridgette Mayer Gallery, and the October Gallery are the only main places in town that regularly feature black artists.

“Most white galleries would not even handle work by black artists, even today,” Webster said as she shuffled around her gallery in her brown velour track suit, pointing out a collection of painted cubes, some of which were crafted by black artists. “When I was showing the work and no one else was, I thought, ‘Why are these other galleries so stupid? It’s some of the best work out there, and maybe a lot of them (are) better than the white artists. So why are they afraid?”

Black artists say that gallery owners fear showing their work will drive away their business.

“That’s the perception,” said James Brantley, a black artist and Webster’s husband of more than 26 years. “That it might drive white collectors away. But it’s not true.”

Brantley, 65, makes conceptual landscapes and has been featured in major museum collections. Brantley says galleries are worried that museums might not pick up their work if they feature too many black artists.

For him, this treatment is all too familiar. Throughout his career, he has had to push past gallery owners who have slammed their doors on him because of his race.

“I remember being in New York, and I went to one gallery and they said to me, ‘You’re a good painter, but you’re not a good artist,’” he said. “What he obviously was saying was that I knew what my craft was, but in the art world, you have to have connections and sometimes you need a certain complexion to get that connection.”

While the art world thrives on creativity, artists live on these kinds of connections. Meeting the right people and rubbing shoulders in the top social circles is one of the main avenues for success. But young black artists, who are in the infancy stage of their careers and have not met many people yet, struggle with this.

“They are not necessarily getting invited to the galas and all those places where they can meet potential buyers or be seen,” said Lisa Nelson-Haynes, the associate director at The Painted Bride Art Center, a nonprofit arts organization that opened in 1969.

The key to success for any minority artist is to cross racial lines, said Libby Rosof, one of the co-founders of The ArtBlog, a Philadelphia-based blog.

“African Americans largely network with African Americans, white people are with white people, and Asians are with Asians,” Rosof said. “So there has to be something that causes somebody to be extraordinary and cross that race line.”

When they first began their blog, Rosof, 64, and her colleague, Roberta Fallon, 61, wanted to cover artists around the area who had not been featured in the news. They saw that young, female and black artists were not getting as much press as seasoned professionals were, and they wanted to change that. With 36,000 page views per month, they have been giving a voice to the underdogs of the art community since 2003. Although both women say they have helped change the game, they believe people still categorize and overlook black artists, and they have to work twice as hard to network their way to the top.

Haynes agrees, and said that the most successful artists of color have learned how to promote themselves almost to the point of becoming their own trademark.

“The most successful ones have mastered being able to market themselves,” she said. “But I’m sure they’re exhausted because they spend so much time marketing themselves and their work.”

Haynes, who is black, has been working for more than seven years at the Bride, where the staff not only provides venues for the artists to show their work, but also helps them find commissioning support. A lot of black artists struggle to finance the projects they want to work on.

“It’s not just about creating the work, it’s about getting the funding to create the work,” Haynes said. “Are they able to sustain themselves solely as working artists? Are they getting the grants? Most frequently, they are not. We see the struggle for getting support a lot and that definitely impacts their visibility.”

She thinks having people of color working on the boards that give grants will help black artists.

“We have to have diversity of voices and if we don’t, we’re not going to see coverage in the papers or in broadcast,” Haynes said.

Art insiders like Fallon said more doors have opened over the past several years for black artists and opportunities have steadily increased.

Auction houses are now starting to dedicate departments to black artists and Webster sees more white buyers in her gallery purchasing work by black artists. Some of the artists she features in her gallery can demand up to the thousands for their pieces, which was not the case 20 years ago.

“I’m sure there are tons of former gallery owners who are saying, ‘Why the hell wasn’t I showing Basquiat when he stumbled in here?” said Haynes. “Why didn’t I take that stuff that he was trying to sell me for 200 bucks? Now, you can’t get a Basquiat for less than $800,000.”

Haynes said one of the original founders of the Bride, Gerry Givnish, supported artists of all color simply because he loved their work.

“He wasn’t looking at them like, ‘Oh wow I’m supporting black artists,’” said Haynes. “He was like, ‘I’m supporting the baddest, spoken word poets on the planet. When Urban Bush Women first danced here 20 years ago, it wasn’t, ‘Wow, I’m supporting black dancers,’ it was,‘Wow, look at those fabulous women dancers, and, oh, they happen to be black!’”

But black artists themselves say that despite their attempts, their situation cannot change overnight.

“When artists catch a cold, minority artists catch pneumonia,” said Brantley. “But racism is no excuse for bitterness. We change the things we can and for the things we can’t change, we just go on with our lives.”

For more information, visit http://theartblog.org/

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