Whose Homeland Is It?

A week after the 9/11 attacks, I spoke to my nearest neighbor on our sparsely populated road in rural upstate New York. John is a city transplant with a Queens accent and the coffee-colored complexion of his Lebanese parents. He's a plumber and a tough guy who has been tossed from several local saloons for his fisticuffs, but now fear was in his voice. "Right after the attacks, this asshole at work came up to me and said, 'You people did it again!'" he recalled. "I looked at him and was about to tell him to go fuck off and then I thought, no, I better keep my mouth shut."

Racist stereotyping, harassment and self-censorship all played out in that brief encounter. John thinks of himself as American, but one hate-filled man in one moment could challenge his identity and sense of security. I wondered at the time how many other such scenarios were unfolding in communities around the country in this tense, overheated climate.

Homeland, the newest work by journalist Dale Maharidge, answers that question and raises many more about the impact 9/11 had on the psyche of a nation already divided by race, class, religion and, most fundamentally, by different understandings of what it means to be American.

In the years since, publishers have cranked out hundreds of books about 9/11. But where was the reporting on the real and perceived changes in communities far from New York and the Pentagon?

In Homeland, Maharidge breaks new ground in the genre of 9/11 journalism by heading into heartland America, his old stomping grounds from three earlier books with photographer Michael Williamson.

For two years, Maharidge traveled the country, from Chicago to West Virginia to Maine, practicing what he calls "Star Trek journalism" – going where no journalists have gone before. He reports the stories that the news media ignored while Williamson documents the story with photos that are poignant and frightening evidence of America's pulsing heart of darkness.

On September 11, 2002, while the herd produced predictable flag-waving and maudlin reportage, Maharidge went to a Chicago suburb where ethnic whites staged a violent rally in an Arab neighborhood. "It seemed every journalist and writer and producer in America was working on a 9/11 anniversary story that day," he writes. "I was no different. But where I was going there was no national press, no bands, no politicians working a crowd, no emotional tales of heroism or loss."

The tales Maharidge relates expose the synergy between economics and racism in Rust Belt communities, whose residents are the victims of post-industrial collapse and what he describes as a "30-year war against the working class." Maharidge aims to "draw back the curtain" on the anger of white working-class people like Nancy and Jim, a mother and son from Oak Lawn, Illinois. Behind their flag-waving and anti-Arab pronouncements are real financial fears. Jim, 35, had two heart attacks and has $200,000 in medical bills he can't pay because he is uninsured and hasn't held a job in two years. Nancy, 56, needs a knee operation but her HMO won't cover it. They are riled up, believing Arab immigrants get "the best medical care" free.

September 11 didn't transform the United States from a nation of tolerant, freedom-loving citizens into one seething with the brand of racial intolerance Jim and Nancy display. It uncorked the genie. "People had hate, they had anger," Maharidge says in an interview. "But it was directionless. After 9/11, it had direction. George Bush was channeling the anger." To what extent are economics and what Maharidge documents as a deepening depression in most of the country responsible for the currents of racism and xenophobia? That is an important question.

As Homeland came out, Harvard's Samuel P. Huntington arrived in bookstores with Who Are We? The Challenges to America's National Identity, the intellectual equivalent of the nativism expressed by Jim and Nancy. Huntington posits that Americans faced with a growing immigrant population need to protect Anglo-Protestantism as a shared culture. He writes that during economic downturns "white nativist movements are a possible and plausible response to these trends." But if Huntington sees nativism as "plausible" and hence defensible because of his own identification with its basic tenets, Maharidge sees nativism and racism as fundamentally anti-democratic, the curdled byproducts of a failed economic system and the betrayal of working-class people, whatever their color or creed.