Questions of Racial Formation on Veterans Day: What Have Black Americans and Other People of Color Really Gained From Service in America's Wars and Military?

Countries and leaders choose war. Its citizens are forced to carry the burden.

The "eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month" are words that marked the end of one of the most destructive conflicts in human history.

Veterans Day was originally intended to mark that armistice as a moment for public remembrance and respect. Now, because of time, distance, and intentional forgetting, Veterans Day is just one more moment when capitalism is made synonymous with democracy in America.

I am not sure if the men who died at the Marne or Flanders or Belleau Wood are happy or sad at how America's remembrance of their loss is now just one more opportunity to go shopping. I would not be so presumptuous as to speak for the dead. But I can wonder nonetheless.

World War One ended almost 100 years ago. It helped to shape the present, as many of the United States' troubles in the Middle East can be traced to the decisions made in response to the Ottoman Empire's death.

World War One's battlefields are still surrendering their secrets: for example, see this great piece on the excavation of the battlefields on and around Gallipoli. And there were still a few World War One veterans alive as recently as 2004, who were eager to tell their stories, stories which author Richard Rubin dutifully recorded and shared in his book The Last of the Doughboys.

[As a parallel thought, I often wonder about what it must have been like to be an American who saw the Civil War, then America's Imperial expansion, and World War One. What profound insights they must have had on those decades of blood-letting and seemingly inexorable growth of American power.]

If we are to truly honor America's veterans, it is not enough to have a day off, go shopping, attend a barbecue, or watch a marathon of "war movies" on cable television.

I would argue that true remembrance involves asking hard questions about how the United States, like most other countries, sends off its young people to die, for lofty goals of "patriotism", to then have them returned, abandoned, neglected, and the real reason for what was then framed as an inexorable and unavoidable conflict, later being revealed as a war of choice, for the enrichment of a few, sold as a lie by the press and politicians, and for the most part unnecessary.

Such an observation will be viewed as impolitic and "unpatriotic" by some less critical minded folks. I would counter that we do not do true honor to the memories of those who served in the United States military, and fought her wars, by denying uncomfortable facts.

In honor of Veterans Day, We are Respectable Negroes will be featuring several short posts this week (and next) related to questions of citizenship, racial formation, and military service.

Racial formation is a framework that tries to capture how "race" is a social fiction, one which is "made" by society, its members, social practices, laws, habits, and conventions. There are no biological races. Race has meaning only to the degree that it was created, responds to, has social currency, and is circulated as an idea that people and society take to be real, and which informs us about some type socially and politically meaningful problem or question.

Race is a true lie; race also structures life chances, opportunities, power relationships, wealth and income, and influences other social categories like gender, sexuality, class, and ethnicity.

Military service, and limiting and defining who is allowed to formally serve and enlist, is one way that the United States has helped to create race at the intersection of citizenship. The latter is very important here: full citizenship means full access to the public goods and rights of the polity and political community.

People of color, women, gays and lesbians, and others who at one moment or another were considered "second class citizens", or members of the "out group", used military service as a way of making claims on full membership in American democracy. They were resisted precisely because those forces of power and social/political conservatism--both elite and "populist"--intimately understand that it is very hard, in the long-term, to deny communities their full citizenship rights if they have spilled blood under the banner(s) of patriotism and nationalism.

Thus, my questions about Veterans Day, military service, and race.

Black Americans served in the United States military while we were denied full citizenship, suffered under Jim and Jane Crow, and were wholly denied our "manhood rights" by the Racial State. One of the great stories of American history is how black folks (and other people of color) leveraged our fighting and dying in the country's wars (very often against other non-whites) to make our claims on liberty and democracy undeniable. I applaud those brothers and sisters who selflessly sacrificed for the Black Freedom Struggle. We/I are/am their children and legacy.

Their service can be viewed from a proximate and distal lens. At the the time, the hope was that military service would break down white supremacy by showing, repeatedly, that black Americans were "real" men, of "American stock", and not a "feminine" race, one intellectually and physically incapable of the rigors of modern war. However, black Americans would repeatedly see our citizenship claims violently denied and rebuffed by dominant white society.

In the long view, such sacrifices seem to have made sense. Black veterans became the foundation of the Civil Rights movement and used their leadership, martial, and other skills to buttress the Black Freedom Struggle. In the short-term, immediately after those conflicts, when black veterans returned home to recalcitrant white supremacy, I am not sure what the pay-off was for their service, and how history would have turned out differently had those black veterans refused to serve on principle.

Why fight for a country that does not love you? Why fight and die and kill and bleed for a country which considers you less than a full member?

These questions resonate in the post civil rights era and the Age of Obama as well: people of color, black Americans in particular, are still subjected to discrimination in the housing and labor markets, subjected to racial profiling, sentenced to harsher punishments for the same crimes as whites, die younger, are not as upward mobility, and their life chances, all things being equal, are in total less than those of white Americans.

Black Americans arrived here long before most white people; yet, we receive the fewest fruits for our role in building this country and contributing to make more perfect its stillborn and defective democratic project.

In all, what do you think of the bargain made, and return given to, black Americans and other people of color for their service in the United States' military over the decades and centuries?