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THE MILITARY’S MYTH OF BLACK FREEDOM  
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Nicole G. Young
May 27, 2024
Yes Magazine
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_ Black people’s conscription into America’s endless war-making
machine only ensures they will never be safe. _

, Illustration by Adobe Stock

 

Black people, we were never patriots; we were pragmatists,” a friend
said to me recently when we talked about both of our grandfathers’
years of military service and their reverberating effects in our
lives. In a lot of ways I agree with her. While class mobility
certainly drives many Black people into the military, it would be
disingenuous to claim our participation is purely mercenary. The
United States military promises Black people stability via economic
security. However, there is an implied second promise: that through
military service, Black people can access honor in our daily lives, in
a country that does not treat us honorably as the default. But decades
of Black participation in the U.S. military have highlighted the ways
that this country has never intended to make good on either of these
promises. 

My grandfather chose the military to continue a family legacy started
by his father and other family members, and presumably to ensure that
his future children and grandchildren would have access to the middle
class. For most of my life—as a Black woman from the South, raised
in a military town—I also believed in the guarantees made to Black
military families. It took me far too long to understand that the
drumbeat of war could not be relied upon. In fact, for Black people,
the only thing that our conscription into America’s perpetual
war-making machine actually ensures is that we will never be safe. 

In reflecting on the storytelling that existed in his own family about
the military, Dr. Daris McInnis, a Black U.S. Army veteran and
professor of education at West Chester University, says “I don’t
come from a family of doctors. I don’t come from a family of college
graduates. … So for my family, it seemed like people who joined the
military really created a new life for themselves.” His father
joined the military when McInnis was 5 or 6, sending the family to
live on military bases around the world. His uncle didn’t graduate
from college but made six figures as a military contractor after 20
years in the military. As a child, this kind of luxury was amazing to
McInnis. 

McInnis graduated from college in 2008, matriculating directly into a
recession. He had no job prospects where he lived in West Texas, even
with a newly minted B.A. in business. But the one industry that was
always hiring was the U.S. military. McInnis recalls his Army
recruiter, a Black woman, saying, “Sure, you can come be an officer,
you can … command troops when you’re 22 years old.” To a young
person, such promises were seductive; he “could go straight in as an
officer … I would essentially outrank my dad. Which is really
cool.”

McInnis was also swayed by the fact that his student loans would be
forgiven by joining the Army. In one fell swoop, the U.S. Army offered
him and thousands of other military recruits like him stability at a
time of deep global uncertainty and a status that his own parents had
not achieved after decades of work. 

The military also assured recruits that they would be making their
country and the world safer by signing up. This is precisely what
motivated Kyle Bibby, interim chief of campaigns and programs
at Color of Change [[link removed]] and a former Marine
Corps infantry captain, to enlist. For Bibby, who grew up in New
Jersey, the events of Sept. 11, 2001, felt way too close to home.
“We lived right next to a train station where people every day
commuted in and out of the city into lower Manhattan and Midtown.
There are people I knew who, for that day, had no idea where their
parents were. And my way of coping with the fear was really trying to
find some level of control.”

Bibby thought he “found control through joining the military.”
But, “You learn very quickly, you are not in control in the
military.” Bibby learned firsthand upon enrolling at the Naval
Academy that talk of meritocracy and rhetoric about earning your place
through honorable service had its limits—especially for Black
people.

It’s a sentiment that is echoed over and over again in Black
veterans’ accounts of their experiences in the military. Despite the
military becoming the first major U.S. institution to desegregate in
1948
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the racism
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soldiers face and their inability to achieve the rank
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their white peers is well documented. So too is the mistreatment of
Black veterans when they return to the U.S. from military tours.

This is in part why Bibby cofounded the Black Veterans Project
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Daniele Anderson and Richard Brookshire. Brookshire, the
organization’s CEO, views his advocacy on behalf of other Black
veterans, at its core, as reparations work. “It is essentially
trying to build out a framework for reparative justice looking at the
history of benefits obstruction that Black vets have faced
historically.” To Brookshire and the Veterans Legal Services Clinic
at Yale Law School’s calculations
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Black veterans are owed big—to the tune of billions of dollars—for
decades of disability-benefits denials based on race. 

Despite racial discrimination during
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after their service, Black people are overrepresented
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the military—a fact that pushed Dr. Nikhil Pal Singh, professor of
social and cultural analysis and history at New York University, to
pursue his current study of race, militarization, and policing. He
wants to understand Black people’s overwhelming presence in prisons
and the military, which he calls “two of the most violent
institutions in American life.”

Singh’s work highlights the inextricable links between U.S.
militarism abroad and the overpolicing and incarceration of Black
Americans at home. According
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Singh, “Throughout U.S. history, militarism and racism have
augmented one another in a tightly bound reciprocity.” And even if
the U.S. military and local police forces are racially diverse, Singh
contends that they “function in certain ways [in which] it doesn’t
really matter who the personnel are.” He sees them as operating with
a “kind of supremacism, a kind of impunity, a kind of ability to
enforce racial order that now enlists significant numbers of people of
color to do it.”

In the years since the police killing of Mike Brown
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which spurred the Movement for Black Lives, much has been written
about the militarization of police
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in cities big and small across the country
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Singh says this can be traced back to anti-war protests of the 1960s,
which “is really the first time you begin to see the National Guard
called in to basically quell uprisings in U.S. cities, but you also
see the beginning of a kind of approach to the police in the United
States that begins to draw from military doctrines.” In other words,
the U.S. began to engage its own citizenry, particularly anti-war
protesters and people of color, as enemy combatants. 

That orientation was later extended to “the war on drugs
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which framed U.S. citizens in the 1970s—often poor and Black—as a
threat to order. At the same time, the tenor of military operations
abroad, both in areas of conflict and in colonial territories such as
the Philippines, began to change into a sort of global policing. 

“Obviously Vietnam is the biggest example,” explains Singh. In
that war, the U.S. “is involved in a kind of series of police
actions. It does not declare war. It’s not fighting against another
sovereign power. It’s seeing itself as trying to use force to create
security, to create order, and to align these newly developing
countries with U. S. interests.” He labels this shift “the
policification of the military.” 

For decades, Black civil rights leaders
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objectors [[link removed]] warned us that a Black face
in a U.S. military uniform is still the face of imperialism. Black
activist, journalist, and vice-presidential nominee Charlotta
Bass once famously
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“The fight for peace is one and indivisible with the fight for Negro
equality.” The violence that soldiers, Black or otherwise, visit
upon other peoples in the name of American safety and security is
mirrored in the disproportionate violence
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Black people experience at the hands of police across the U.S.

The truth is that the U.S. government needs Black people to buy into
the promise of the military (and by extension, policing) both at home
and abroad. However, our survival as Black people—our liberation
from the systems that harm us—is dependent on our refusal to believe
the storytelling of the U.S. military and our rejection of the
narrative that it is a force for good, both in our own lives and
around the world. In addressing these myths, Singh adds, “We have to
really recognize that [the police and the military] are not
security-making institutions, they’re insecurity-making
institutions. They do it in the ways in which they intervene and
introduce violence into situations that could be resolved in other
ways, less violently.”

For McInnis, his own scholarship has led him to interrogate the
reasons why he joined the military in the first place. The lack of
opportunities he and other Black people like my grandfather
experienced in their hometowns is much more pervasive than he
understood as a 22-year-old. “Where America fails to really put
these things into context is to ask: Well, what was already there to
make this your reality anyway?” McInnis muses. “What creates a
place and a life where so few of us can enter the middle class or
enter jobs where we can have a little bit of savings and some health
care?” he asks. It is well past time that we as Black people
question our participation in the U.S. military, both as active
service members and upholders of its mythmaking. Because the question
is: Can we really call ourselves pragmatists if the necks we’re
standing on are our own? 

_Nicole G. Young is a writer and artist whose nonfiction work has been
featured in Elle, Vox, Scalawag, and Bitch magazines. She’s part
of the editorial team of Jacaranda Books, working to bring a
nonfiction book series on Black American culture to life. She
previously served as a writer at The African American Policy Forum,
co-host of the Kidlit These Days and Worth Noting podcasts, and
contributing editor for Book Riot Media. _

_YES! Media is independent and nonpartisan. Our EXPLANATORY
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and explores opportunities for systemic, structural change. Our
stories uncover environmental, economic, and social justice
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world. Our COMMENTARIES address dominant economic, political, and
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* US military
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* black soldiers
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* policing
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* Racism
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