Watershed events like 9-11 throw America’s racial stratification into flux, redrawing group alignments.

Evidence

But Walter’s actions were an obvious manifestation of something more subtle that was going on at Mike’s Food Center and in some parts of the culture at large after September 11. “The West Indians are with us,” Kareem told me one day while packing soda bottles onto a shelf. “The American blacks are another story.” Watershed moments like September 11 tend to throw America’s bedrock of racial stratification into flux. And despite the fact that African Americans continue nationally to be exceedingly critical of the Bush administration—a Harris Poll conducted in June 2007 found that 88 percent disapproved of Bush’s handling of the “war on terror”—Walter and a few others at the store project themselves as real Americans protecting the nation against a pernicious, un-American threat. West Indians and Palestinians, on the other hand, share similar kinds of postcolonial sensibilities. Enduring affiliations to distant homelands, lived experiences connected to American foreign policy, and contemporary immigrant aspirations to thrive in places like Brooklyn all complicate their attachments to the United States. — Moustafa Bayoumi, How Does It Feel to Be a Problem? Being…, 509

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to a general theme about how crisis moments reorganize immigrant/ethnic hierarchies — parallels the ‘model minority’ literature and middleman-minority sociology.