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Race, Justice, and the Experience of War
62 Plays1 year ago
In this episode, we discuss the intersection of racism and the experience of war. We look at the history of empire, DEI efforts in the military, and the ways that Critical Race Theory offers insights for understanding the history of institutional racism.
Guests: Leah Nahmias and Cleveland Hayes
Audio Engineers: Jason M. Kelly and Kelly Kerr
- Du Bois, W. E. B. “Credo [https://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b227-i010].” In Darkwater: Voices from within the Veil. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Howe, 1920.
- King Jr., Martin Luther King. “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence.” Riverside Church [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJhgXKGldUk], New York City, April 4, 1967. Transcription at American Rhetoric Online Speech Bank (https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkatimetobreaksilence.htm)
- Ture, Kwame [born Stokely Carmichael]. "Black Power Speech at University of California, Berkeley [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifH5X9dYzG8&t=2s]." 29 October 1966. Transcription at the US Oratory Project (https://voicesofdemocracy.umd.edu/carmichael-black-power-speech-text/).
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Transcript
Introduction to Podcast and Themes
00:00:05
Speaker
Welcome to the Justice and War in American History podcast. I'm Jason Kelly. And I'm Ray Habersky. War has long been an indelible part of America's story, shaping national identity, values and principles. The experience of war has transformed the lives of each generation. And because of this, it has historically elicited impassioned debates and conflicting perspectives.
00:00:28
Speaker
This podcast aims to explore this history by bringing together a diverse range of voices, veterans, active service members, citizens and scholars. Through our conversations, we will consider the ways in which war has shaped and reshaped notions of justice. In the process, we will engage with broad themes such as duty, heroism, suffering, loyalty and patriotism. Our broad framework during this season is to compare and contrast the histories of the Spanish-American
00:00:56
Speaker
Philippine-American and Vietnam wars, wars that had a profound effect on the people of the United States.
Podcast Funding and Objectives
00:01:02
Speaker
The National Endowment for the Humanities has generously provided funding for this project, making it possible to have conversations about the effects of war on American veterans, their families, and the generations who bear witness to conflict. Welcome back to Justice and War in American History. In this episode, we talk about race, justice, and the experience of war.
Introducing Guests and Their Backgrounds
00:01:26
Speaker
Yes, today I sit down and talk to Lia Namias, who you met in the last, actually two episodes ago. She's a public humanist here in the city of Indianapolis, a fantastic scholar. And my colleague in the School of Education, Dr. Cleveland Hayes, who is also in the Air Force. And we talk about the history of race and the experience of war. Again, comparing the Spanish-American War and the Vietnam War
00:01:55
Speaker
to contemporary experiences, uh, of race. And this episode is really important because it talks about how Americans, uh, and the language that Americans use around race have both shaped war and been shaped by war. So I think this is a really fundamental pivotal episode. And just like in gender where we had a part one and a part two, this is definitely a topic that we're going to be coming back into the future.
00:02:20
Speaker
Welcome, Cleveland. Welcome, Leah. It's great to see you. Just to get us started today, would you each introduce yourselves, Cleveland? I'm Cleveland Hayes. I'm faculty in the School of Education, Water Services, Associate Dean of Academic Affairs, and I'm also a professor of Urban Teacher Education. I have an appointment in Africana Studies also.
00:02:40
Speaker
So I consider myself an interdisciplinary researcher where I look at my research is divided up what I consider in four silos. While I look at the historical context of black education. I also look at the experiences that Latino male teachers have in schools, teaching
00:02:57
Speaker
basically exemplary Latino teachers, Latino male teachers. I look at the intersections of race and sexuality, more so racism and queer spaces, and then whiteness. And you have people who talk about whiteness theory and critical whiteness studies. I don't do critical whiteness studies because I consider whiteness that I do as ways of which people of color, the BIPOC community uphold whiteness and white supremacy.
00:03:24
Speaker
I just finished 31 years in the military and Air Force Reserve, that was four years active duty. And then I've been in the reserves for 25. And I'm the hospital administrator in my in my unit, we have a medical unit and I'm hospital administrator and also managed to D D E I efforts for the base. Thanks so much, Leah.
00:03:48
Speaker
Hi, I'm Leah. I am currently a community leadership officer for the Indianapolis Foundation, which means I'm on the grant making team. Previously, I was worked in kind of the public humanity sector, including most recently, the director of programs for Indiana humanities in.
00:04:08
Speaker
In that work, I have done or been involved with several reading and discussion programs focused on veterans and their military service. I was a co-director, I guess, of a
00:04:24
Speaker
of a national project in partnership with the Great Books Foundation called Talking Service, which was, you know, kind of bringing groups of veterans together to kind of read works, you know, reflecting on kind of the long history in the humanities texts of kind of military service. And then this was really specifically targeted at this moment of kind of standing down, right, of what happens when you come home and how you adjust or not back into civilian life.
00:04:52
Speaker
That's a little bit of my background, and I'm excited to be here. Thank you. Thanks to both of you for being here.
Historical Perspectives on War and Racism
00:04:58
Speaker
Today, our conversation centers around the histories of race and racism in the context of war and the experience of those things. The two primary documents, as our audience knows who listen to this, what we have for every episode are a few primary documents from which we jump off in the conversation.
00:05:22
Speaker
Today we have a piece by W. E. B. Du Bois from 1904 called Credo. And this was written in the wake of the Spanish-American War and of course the Philippine-American War, which is one of the centerpiece wars that we are talking about in this series.
00:05:44
Speaker
And then the other piece is Martin Luther King's speech at the Riverside Church in 1967. Thank you. And that was an important speech for him because it was a pivotal speech in his career and critiquing Vietnam. So those are the two areas that we're going to be looking at today.
00:06:09
Speaker
but we're going to be thinking about these issues more broadly. So I was just wondering as a way in to what we're talking about, if both of you might be able to give a reflection on why you think studying the histories of race and racism are so important, not just for understanding the experience of war, but more broadly for understanding US history. So I have
00:06:38
Speaker
Critical race theory has a tenor called interest convergence. And one of the tenets of that is interest convergence is that people of color don't, their success, for lack of a better word, doesn't move forward unless the dominant discourse, which is in the case in the US as white folk, their agendas get moved along with it as well, or their interest is upheld.
00:07:05
Speaker
So when you think about this in the context of war and it started, you know, the people make the argument around Brown versus Board of Education that we're in the middle of the Cold War and countries in Africa were decolonizing and they were making the context, well, why would we want to model ourselves after the after the US when a large part of their citizenry
00:07:28
Speaker
were in segregated schools and headed to the back of the bus and couldn't go to use the same restroom facilities and so the Brown versus Board of Education one and two was passed. I often think about that in the context of the Civil Rights Act that was passed in 1965 when the throes of the Vietnam War, when the US needed
00:07:52
Speaker
bodies to go to Vietnam, mostly black bodies that were going because many of them didn't have access to education. They went in in schools and they were often taken away. They weren't part of the draft body, the draft corps.
00:08:07
Speaker
because they weren't in college unlike you had in white men. So I make the argument, and I don't have an empirical evidence to support this, but I do firmly believe that the Civil Rights Act of 1965 was passed because Martin Luther King was constantly on Johnson's case about passing that because he needed black bodies to go to Vietnam. I mean, I'm not going to say anything smarter than that.
00:08:34
Speaker
Yeah, you're Cleveland. Some of the things that you were saying really make me think, first of all, I think like in the Dr. King piece that we read, he talks about like Americans failures on race, which is kind of, I mean, I'm just like, you can't understand anything in American history without thinking like deeply and critically about race.
00:08:52
Speaker
But he's saying specifically these failures, he calls the Vietnamese must see Americans as strange liberators, right? Like how are the Americans going to present themselves as a model of governance, right? Like because of the ways in which democracy is failing, the ideas of liberty are obvious failures. And I think that that
00:09:14
Speaker
is a huge thing of what's happening in the Cold War, right? Is that the United States is intervening and King talks about all of this. I had read parts of this speech before. I think I'd seen quotes. I mean, there are a few quotes where I was like, I'm sure I've seen this like on a
00:09:30
Speaker
someone's wall, you know, or something. But I had never read the whole thing through, but he talks a lot about, um, that, um, you know, the United States is intervening in all these revolutionary movements and quote unquote, the third world in the 1950s, sixties, um, eventually the seventies and eighties. Um, and, um, they're on the wrong side, right? And they are unable to make an appeal to those revolutionary move. Now he's going to tie that to our,
00:10:00
Speaker
capitalist interests, our interests in protecting property, but also the fundamental racialized way of looking at the world that the United States represents. Brown people are not able to self-govern. Brown people's hopes for liberation and freedom are not compatible with our interests in the rest of the world.
00:10:23
Speaker
I think that that context of what's happening in the Cold War and how the United States' failure is internal, like it's, you know, and I know this, I mean the Soviet Union was.
00:10:34
Speaker
you know, making an appeal to third world revolutionary, and I hate the term third world, but right, the revolutionary movements in the global south, you know, around, like, why would you hit your wagon to the United States? Like, look how they treat their populations of color, their poor folks. And so, yeah, I think that that's a huge part of understanding kind of
00:10:58
Speaker
You know, strategy and King calls this out. I think the other thing that Cleveland's comments made me think about, which is kind of this larger history.
00:11:08
Speaker
And this is where the military service comes in. This idea that you will somehow prove yourself fit for citizenship through military service or support for the war effort. Women do this during the Civil War and during World War I when they're making the case that they should have the right to vote. And I just think that like, so there's some deep ties because of the exclusions of people of color from the body politic that many times people see
00:11:38
Speaker
the opportunity to kind of enter the body politic, prove their fitness for citizenship. They have to, they, they, I feel like, I mean, I'm aware of a lot of this rhetoric during, you know, the civil war and black soldiers, but right, like this kind of desire to, um, maybe they'll finally see that we deserve all of these things. And then, I mean, some of the readings, right, get at like the tension of that, right? Like, why do we have to prove ourselves
00:12:05
Speaker
to any of these folks, like we know it, right? Like we have leverage actually in these movements to kind of push forward our civil rights agenda. And I think a lot about in World War II, right, A. Philip Randolph and other folks are organizing in the 40s because they recognize there's like unique moments of leverage in more time to kind of push forward the civil rights agenda. So I think the savviness of that politics that's happening in the black community,
00:12:31
Speaker
is really worth looking at, but I also think the kind of tragedy that that's what it takes, right, to prove your fitness for citizenship. And I mean, just to carry it one step forward, is we've also always had, at least in the 20th century, you know, the idea that immigrants can serve in the US military and kind of be fast-tracked for citizenship. I mean, so this is like deeply embedded in
00:12:57
Speaker
the relationship between military service and race. Like, I just think that that is so present throughout American history. Leeven, did you want to respond to that at all? I can't respond to that. No, I can.
Race, Military Service, and Citizenship
00:13:14
Speaker
This this conversation is already off to a great start. Both of you had such important things to say. We could just talk about what you both said this whole time. I'm thinking about the context in 1904 when W.E.B. Du Bois publishes Credo.
00:13:28
Speaker
This is a one-pager about the things, his credo, really, these things that he holds important and puts front and center as he's thinking about his life and the world in which he lives. When we think of 1904, we're in the wake of an imperialist war, right? The Philippine-American War, it comes to an end, but this is an imperialist war that the United States has embarked upon. Not the first and certainly not the last imperialist war.
00:13:58
Speaker
And it fits into so that international context, but it fits into a national context as well. The decades following the collapse of reconstruction and the growth and expansion of Jim Crow in the United States. And, you know, 1904 is, you know, we're right in the heart of this moment where the US is facing racial terrorism throughout the country.
00:14:28
Speaker
that is both grassroots and also supported in part by the state by turning a blind eye, the segregation that's enforced by the state in the schools and in housing, et cetera. And this is when he's writing this credo. And credo is not necessarily a document specifically focused on war. That's not why we chose this document. Rather, we're trying to put the Spanish-American, Philippine-American war
00:14:59
Speaker
in a context. And it's only towards the bottom of the piece where he talks or at least speaks to war. And the paragraph that he speaks to, he says, I believe in the prince of peace. I believe that war is murder. I believe that armies and navies are bottom, the tinsel and braggadocio of oppression and wrong. And I believe that the wicked conquest
00:15:29
Speaker
of weaker and darker nations by nations wider and stronger, but foreshadows the death of that strength.
00:15:36
Speaker
And I wanted to focus in a little bit because it seems to me that he is speaking about the Spanish-American War, about the Philippine-American War here. And I just wanted to get both of your responses to what Du Bois is putting forward here. I'm often thought, you know, when you think about W.E. Du Bois, you have to go back to the construction of race in the first place and this piece back towards slavery.
00:16:00
Speaker
And anytime I have a conversation about race with my students or start any, depending upon the audience, I always refer back to that in terms of why race was constructed in the first place. After the Civil War, where plantation owners were afraid that freed slaves and those who oversaw them would now join forces and overthrow them.
00:16:24
Speaker
Fast forward to the Mexican-American War, where, and I did not know this until I was reading this book by Paul Ortiz, The History of Blacks and Latinos, and that's not the exact title of the book in the Americas, where, well, it might consume that the Underground Railroad went north, but it also went south to Mexico. And Mexico had already ended slavery in Mexico.
00:16:48
Speaker
So the United States went to war with Mexico, not because of something egregious that Mexico did. It was just like, okay, our slaves are going to Mexico and we need to go back and reclaim that property. Going back to this whole notion with Critical Race Day where we're talking about whiteness as property. And that, so the United States
00:17:09
Speaker
outreach across wherever often has to do around their interests. And so while I am not a historian and really understanding the nuances of the Filipino-American War, the Spanish-American War,
00:17:27
Speaker
I'm sure it was something concocted just because there was something that the United States needed. And I'm guessing they were already foreseen that the Philippines would be a very strategic place in terms of the outreach in the far Pacific, Japan, China, Taiwan, et cetera. Oh, so we need this territory as a military strategy place. I'm also guessing that was probably something around
00:17:55
Speaker
resources that the Filipinos had that we needed to be able to conduct war is also my guess and I'm guessing and I were really good friend of mine who was a professor at Caltech, he's a historian and he has this book and we were talking about that
00:18:13
Speaker
colonization of brown people goes all the way back to Columbus. That in Europe, and I'm paraphrasing what he said, that they drew a line and that people north of the equator who tend to have lighter skin don't need to be managed. And then people who live north of the equator who have to, just because science and understanding that we need melanin and our skin to protect us from the heat of the sun were needed to be managed. And so you have all these countries
00:18:42
Speaker
U.S. included that needed to now colonize and control those people in one form or the other. Going back to the comment that he's making right here, I think you made that you made earlier. So, yeah, I so I think that.
00:18:57
Speaker
You're exactly right. And I'm going to be a real nerd about here. So I am a former high school US history teacher. And I used to work for the American Social History Project, which has done a lot of work around the Spanish-American War and especially the dissent movements against that war. And then I currently, in a freelance role, have been doing some curriculum development for the Filipino
00:19:18
Speaker
Veterans Recognition and Education Project, which looks at, you know, why do we have so many Filipino veterans who are then completely denied all of their benefits by the US government? Because it was too many brown people to accept citizenship, right? So this, this is like a really rich vein. So it's right, like they're making a claim, this is a military stronghold, we're going to get rubber and other things so we can build the war machine. I love that you said that. But then also, these people don't understand
00:19:44
Speaker
how to self-govern like we're here to save them we're here to civilize them completely ignoring first of all that like there was a revolutionary independence movement in the Philippines that had been building for some time against the Spanish and then we kind of inherit the roles.
00:20:00
Speaker
conquerors we and you know and the disappointment that Filipino nationalists had like they were really like okay if America comes in these people understand democracy and self-governance they broke off from an empire like this is our great hope and then the United States come in and they brutally kill
00:20:22
Speaker
that hope and I mean and then the actual circumstances of this war are just that it is absolute brutality and Americans don't learn this war. We learn the Spanish American war.
00:20:31
Speaker
was quick and easy, and we signed a treaty six months later, and most of what we learned was that a ship blew up in Havana. We don't even pay attention to what's happening on the other side of the world, and that we're intervening where there's already a conflict around the idea of self-governance for Filipinos. And then it goes on for, I mean, I think some historians would say four years, I think really up at least until 1910 you have
00:20:54
Speaker
skirmishes and fighting and the the civilian death toll is anywhere from a hundred to three hundred thousand people I mean it is and it's brutal I mean it's some extermination right so it's it's bodies and trenches it's everything that we kind of you know imagine when we think of modern war is like what's happening in the Philippines and so the anti-war movement in the United States and you know WU Du Bois and other black intellectuals are like very front and center in this movement are
00:21:22
Speaker
They are, A, calling it what it is, and they are also absolutely outraged. This is a complete subversion of American ideals. And I would love if there were a scholar of empire to talk about this a little bit more, but I do think this is a moment, part of the fervency of this anti-war movement against the Philippines war is because Americans are having their ideals about their own democracy destroyed in real time.
00:21:51
Speaker
Now, of course, you can say, how can you not be looking at Jim Crow and not seeing that? But I think there is this imperial colonial movement or change in US foreign policy, essentially, does awaken a lot of Americans to the idea of this isn't the America that I believe in.
00:22:13
Speaker
120 years later, we cannot see this because this is the America all of us grew up in, right, in a very explicit way. This is US foreign policy has been, 1898 is a turning point in US foreign policy. So yeah, I think that like that brutality of that war, I mean, I just to go back to the quote, I mean, he says like it's a wicked conquest of weaker and darker nations by nations whiter and stronger. So he's putting race right in the center of how we have to think of this conflict.
00:22:44
Speaker
And it foreshadows the death of that strength. I think he's right. And that's very much what critics of this colonial enterprise in the United States are doing. They're saying,
00:22:56
Speaker
this will be the downfall of the strength of our country is our democracy. And so if we pursue such an anti-democratic policy, that will weaken us. And then also, I mean, I don't maybe he's saying here, I think we're going to spend a lot of money doing this and we can't spend money on anything else if we're spending money on war and building up an empire. I will say the other two quotes that I love in this are the imagery that he has
00:23:23
Speaker
He talks about armies and navies are at bottom, the tinsel and braggadocio of oppression and wrong. And I think tinsel to me is like, there's something really weak and flimsy, I guess, in that imagery, right? That these things are, we think they're strength, but there's like a flimsiness to it. And then the braggadocio to me
00:23:43
Speaker
I think about like, that's like this kind of like machismo, there's something really gendered about that idea of kind of puffing yourself up as like you're really strong. And he just skewers that like right away. And I love that part of this quote. Yeah, that gender piece that you're talking about, right? So this is that moment where gender and race and empire are so tied up together that
00:24:11
Speaker
The individuals putting forward the ideals of expanding empire are speaking it just point blank. This is about manliness. This is about whiteness. And they're using that as talking points.
00:24:28
Speaker
Not as, you know, kind of silent dog whistles, but actually as front and center talking points. And this has been center to US warfare and imperial warfare by Europeans and North Americans since, you know, at least the early 19th century. We see it in the Mexican-American war that you were talking about as well. One example
00:24:52
Speaker
of somebody who's talking in this language is the Senator Albert Beveridge, who is a Senator from Indiana at this point. And in 1898, he gives a speech here in Indiana to the Republican convention that's here, and he's speaking specifically to the outbreak of war. And, and this is, this is what he says. I, I'm sorry, both of you don't have this reading, so I'm going to read part of it for you to give a sense of, to Leah, to Leah, what Leah just said, the opposition,
00:25:22
Speaker
So he's speaking about those opposing war, that opposition that's emerging. The opposition tells us that we ought not to govern a people without their consent, right? The very principles of democracy, right? I answer the rule of liberty that all just government derives its authority from the consent of the governed applies only to those who are capable of self-government. You know, this circular argument.
00:25:50
Speaker
We govern the Indians without their consent. We govern our territories without their consent. We govern our children without their consent. How do they know that our government would be without their consent? Would not the people of the Philippines prefer the just, humane, civilizing government of this republic to the savage, bloody rule of pillage and extortion from which we have rescued them?" So he's- This makes me miss being a teacher because you bring out like a primary source like this and the kids get it.
00:26:21
Speaker
It's just like, this is pretty like, you know, it's one of these like smoking gun primary sources. Sorry, Jason. Oh no. But this is the language that we've heard every decade since, right? Should these people be left to govern themselves? If we leave them to govern themselves, somebody else is going to come in and govern them who will not respect their rights.
00:26:43
Speaker
So we must intervene and it's framed. He's flipping this idea of democracy on
Imperialism and Racist Rhetoric: Then and Now
00:26:49
Speaker
its head. He's playing the opposition's argument of the importance of democracy and then framing it in this very paternalistic, imperialist, racist mode of talking about warfare that kind of defines the pro-war arguments that we see so many times over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries.
00:27:13
Speaker
I think the key word that you have there is humanity, or the lack thereof. And I think people can justify, and I'm very clear that if I was not in a medical unit, and I'm just going to put out here, I'm not speaking as a reservist. I'm speaking as Dr. Cleveland Hayes, faculty at IUPUI, who happens to do this one weekend a month.
00:27:39
Speaker
that if I was not in a medical unit, I probably would have retired a long time ago because people don't see the people who are making decisions and the same young people to war and care which one it is.
00:27:57
Speaker
don't see the outcome, don't see the aftermath when they come back. And we were doing a tour in San Diego and I'm seeing these young people who I could have been a high school teacher with no legs, who had just come back from either Afghanistan or Iraq. It really changed my mind about the whole notion of war and military and service and all that.
00:28:23
Speaker
And I'm in very clear that if I was not two things if I was not in the medical unit or if I was not at a base that didn't send Fighters off to do I probably I just couldn't be part of that military I can be part of that war making machine because not only is it impacting the
00:28:46
Speaker
the human toll and the places that we're going off to again because people don't see that humanity and after 9-11 people didn't see the people from Afghanistan and Iraq in particular as human. Look what they have done to and I'm very clear and been very open about this even in military spaces.
00:29:03
Speaker
I was like, well, the United States needs to look at their own humanity and lack thereof of people of their own citizenship. I'm talking about, in particular, black people, historically indigenous people, Latinx people in the southwest part of the United States, it's just this torture
00:29:23
Speaker
of people and people when you don't need that, when you don't know that history, you'll be more apt to either ignore it or don't even recognize the humanity of when you are putting people together and sending them off to somewhere to do this, create this mass destruction in these communities. And then another thing I don't think we have to add to this conversation is James Baldwin. And James Baldwin always, you know,
00:29:53
Speaker
You know, I think whoever's going to listen, we can provide the beauty about being living in the U.S. is that we can provide some critique of it. And this doesn't make us any less American because we're talking about it. And again, it's that propaganda machine that if you have any critique of the things that the U.S. does, then you will be an un-American and all that. So I would recommend whoever's listening to this who start feeling some kind of way about this to pick up some James Baldwin and read that too.
00:30:21
Speaker
always pick up James Baldwin. That's just good advice every day. I mean, I just think about the necessity of the kind of rhetoric that we hear in the beverage speech in order to justify a war in a democracy, right? Like you have to come up with a rhetorical justification
00:30:44
Speaker
Um, that is in keeping with the, I mean, you're a Senator of the US government, right? Like you have to find a way to say what we're doing is actually democratic in some way. And like that, that feels like necessary intellectual work to justify war on a democracy. I find that, I mean, we can all say it doesn't really pass muster, right? He's not particularly successful, but I do think that that's like a huge part of what
00:31:11
Speaker
like that we've had to that our leadership does over and over again in since 1898 of and I think I mean that rhetoric is so similar frankly to kind of the neoliberal like case for intervention in Iraq after 9-11 right it is you know we're going to topple a dictator we're going to you know
00:31:36
Speaker
help them establish democracy. I mean, the United States does that. We're always the good guys, right? We're here spreading democracy around the world. Something else you were saying, Cleveland, made me find a connection to the King speech. And it's actually a relatively small part of the King speech that we read. So he talks a lot in that speech about the moral case against the Vietnam War and really all war.
00:32:02
Speaker
is the harm that it does to the people that are being subjugated, right? But he does say, like, at this point, I want to make clear that while I've tried to talk about the voiceless in Vietnam, can we spend a minute thinking about our own troops? And he doesn't just say what happens is that they are brutalized by committing acts of war by their service, right? And that is already a tragedy. But then he says, we are adding cynicism to the process of death
00:32:30
Speaker
for they must know after a short period that none of the things that we claim to be fighting for are really involved, right? And he kind of identifies that as the second tragedy that happens to service members, and particularly maybe here in the context of Vietnam, that whatever it is that you believed sincerely and were told about the reason for going to war, the experience on the ground,
00:32:55
Speaker
will kind of shatter those notions. And then what sets in is cynicism. And that cynicism is a really dangerous thing to unleash in the body politic too. As much as like brutality, and I think a lot about people who speak about kind of our gun culture, right? That weapons of war at home or abroad come home, right? And we bring this violence back. That is something to be concerned about. But that cynicism is also something that King identifies as like a really dangerous
00:33:23
Speaker
byproduct seems trivializing, but byproduct of the war. Anyway, and I just, some of what you were saying Cleveland made me think of that particular line in his speech. So Cleveland, you've said the word critical race theory a couple times so far in this conversation. And I know that in our contemporary context, critical race theory
00:33:47
Speaker
is I would argue broadly not understood at all. And this is maybe a good moment to explain, hopefully in a relatively short framework, what critical race theory is so that we can maybe have a groundwork to work from and we're thinking and talking about it.
00:34:09
Speaker
So Critical Race Theory is, let me just be very clear, it gets marketed as just being this anti-white thing and snot. If you really understand what it is and when you're unpacking, I'm gonna try to do it here in the next 90 seconds. I mean, I spent 16 weeks teaching the course and they still, I mean, I took it and I'm still learning and so I'm gonna try to hit some of the high points.
00:34:39
Speaker
So I started off in critical legal studies with Derrick Bell, Kimberly Crenshaw, and really looking at the ways of which
00:34:51
Speaker
Black and brown folks, particular black people were being treated within the legal system, over policing, over these harsh sentences for some of the same crimes, etc. Gloria Latsen Billings and Bill Tate moved into education, where you're looking at
00:35:10
Speaker
how of which black people that it started off with were engaged in in school space. So there are tenets that rule the framework. One is that racism is an endemic part of the United States. That does not make you a racist. That just says that while race may not be the only factor, it is never not a factor. And that's my interpretation of that.
00:35:40
Speaker
The second part of that is recognizing the experiential knowledge that people of color bring to a conversation. Just because you didn't experience it as a white person does not mean that I didn't experience. And I had a conversation with, um, I was in a meeting here on campus and I was in a colleague and I was trying to let that was being dismissed because my experience didn't go along with theirs. I was like, you can't do that. You, which you have just done is just marginalized means. So that's the second part.
00:36:10
Speaker
Also, critical race theory is a theoretical framework and a methodology in educational spaces. And so it values storytelling. And so if you've ever been in a conversation with me, sometimes I start off with a story. I'm like, I'm a critical race theory and I got a story to tell to go along that to make my point. Kind of like what I'm doing right now.
00:36:30
Speaker
And then it is very interdisciplinary in terms of bringing is bringing in histories, bringing in social workers, bringing in sociology. I think medicine is the next frontier for critical race theory when you look at the health disparities and the pandemic really, really brought that to light.
00:36:48
Speaker
that a lot of people in medical schools, nursing schools, dental schools need to begin to look at the fact that black women have higher birth mortality than white women.
00:37:04
Speaker
Oh, and the property of whiteness and, and, and, and really recognizing that again, just, you know, recognizing the property of whiteness does not make you a racist. It's understanding that they're just in that white privilege, which also gets people all upset. Going back to the tentative CRT.
00:37:21
Speaker
is that when I'm traveling in Indiana, there are just certain things that I have to be vivid or deliberate about when I'm traveling from here to my hometown of Mississippi where I stop. I just cannot stop everywhere. And coming back one year, I came up on the sundown town coming back, and I didn't realize it was the sundown town until I got there, and I'm like,
00:37:42
Speaker
Oh, there are no black people here. And I'm getting all these crazy looks, but I had to get gas. And so I'm pumping my gas, pump my gas and get in my car. And I didn't go in, I didn't do anything. I'm just looking around to make sure if anything pops off, I'm ready to go. Then it also looks at, it also looks at, and I think one of the
00:38:05
Speaker
A lot of people who have ever critical of critical race theory, regardless of phenotype, are talking about that meritocracy is just a certain thing around meritocracy. And I make the argument that meritocracy is a lot because I know a lot of, and that means if you just work hard, you'll get, you know, you won't experience racism. And I can remember right after Kellen Kaepernick started kneeling, kneeling, doing the national anthem,
00:38:30
Speaker
people in my reunion were asking me about it, and I said, okay, well, let me just put it to you in this context. I was like, I middle class, I hold this rank in the military, I have a PhD, I middle class, I own my own home. I have this whole long list of things that people tell you that if you just do, you want to experience racism. I'm still experiencing racism. Can you help me? Can you understand that? I mean, that's rhetorical because I know
00:38:56
Speaker
They can't answer that question, but I'm trying to get people to really think about when you look at the framework that it is not about white versus black, us versus them, you know, going into this oppression Olympics, but really, really recognizing that people have different lived experiences and race contributed to that.
00:39:17
Speaker
And I was watching this and lastly, I was watching this podcast or something. I was not watching the podcast, but listening to something on TV. And if the person made the point, they said that if critical race theory is being taught in schools, white women are doing it because schools are 83% white and female. So if CRT is being taught in schools, it's not people of color is doing it. And so the white women, it's white women doing if it's being taught in school.
00:39:47
Speaker
I don't have anything to add to that. I mean, he's right. But this is an important thing then. So you talked about education, you talked about property, you talked about legal systems.
Critical Race Theory and Military Insights
00:40:01
Speaker
What about the military here? So, you know, is there some insight that you think critical race theory gives us into understanding the military, the lived experience perhaps of a
00:40:15
Speaker
of an active service member or perhaps maybe the institution itself. So right after Joyce Floyd was murdered, General Brown becomes the Chief of Staff of the Air Force, the first black person to hold that position. Lord Austin becomes the first person to be the Secretary of Defense in 2021 when there was a change in administration.
00:40:37
Speaker
So I will have to say after George Floyd was murdered there, the Air Force, I can't speak for the services, but I do know for the Air Force that there has been, they've created a DEI office at the headquarters Air Force.
00:40:53
Speaker
That's why it's going to be so important that whoever gets elected in 2024 has the potential for all that to go away. Because they did go away in 2020 by executive order that all DEI efforts in DOD had to stop. Change of administration and brought it back. So it becomes very important because they were looking at the time, they were looking at non-judicial punishment. Things that don't go to course marshal.
00:41:21
Speaker
things like being late for work, or things like coming back from lunch late, etc., where black service people were being punished at much higher rates than white service people. And I recognize that myself. And I often ask, how have I escaped some of this, because I have a big mouth
00:41:39
Speaker
And I call stuff out when I see I'm like, how have I escaped all this harshness and maybe I'm just a token person and they just don't mess with me. I don't know, because I often look at my friends, my black friends who have not
00:41:53
Speaker
They experienced all of that that I did not experience, even now. So the Air Force, specifically for the Air Force, they have been trying to at least make an effort. Originally was around non-judicial punishment. And I think because of my expertise in my reserve unit and my wing, we have moved that beyond that because I think that's just a low goal around just looking at non-judicial punishment.
00:42:20
Speaker
Because there is an EEO office that looks at if I go and have a complaint that I've been discriminated against for some reason or another. But I was telling the EEO officers, like, well, my job, the DEI stuff that I do on a basis really puts you out of business. Because to recognize that when people start looking at the collective humanity, equity is a low goal. Collective humanity are people in the service, in the Air Force in particular. That's what I can speak to.
00:42:49
Speaker
So to answer your question in a roundabout way, yes, there is a place with critical race theory in the in the Air Force when you're looking at the experiences that people have, when you look at the rank structure, who sits around the table, like there are no, there's one black commander, I think, on my base. It's a flight fighter, it's a, it's a pilot, it's a, you know, we fly airplanes.
00:43:14
Speaker
Often you have to have so much hours outside of the Air Force before you even get a pilot slot. Often people of color can't afford those classes because you have to have a private pilot's license which costs a lot of money. So they begin to really recognize the experiences that people are coming from, that everybody's not coming from a position of privilege to be able to do certain things within the military space and recognizing
00:43:43
Speaker
that know when you look at who gets promoted, for example, or who isn't getting promoted. And then when you bring in gender, when you think about this intersectionally, which is one of the tenets of CRT, the around the intersections, that women often leave the military once they start having children.
00:44:03
Speaker
Or they can't go off TDY to this class because they're a joint spouse. And so what I mean by joint spouse is both members in the military. Well, one person's got to stay here and take care of the children, so often the husband will go.
00:44:22
Speaker
So my point is, yes, there is a place for CRT in DOD. I think DOD is trying to right a lot of wrongs, but you still have a lot of people who are really resistant to it. The Air Force now allows you to put your signature block, put your pronouns on your signature block.
00:44:47
Speaker
which I thought was a huge step for the, I don't know if it's DOD, but I know it's Air Force, where there were people who would fill some kind of way about that. And when I was doing a diversity training for the squadron, I'm like, how does that impact you? That has zero impact on you, but what you just did would take away someone's humanity around that. So if we're going to continue to, and I think we're seeing
00:45:15
Speaker
Two things going on in the military is that I think you have the wokeness, which is a co-op word from America Badu.
00:45:27
Speaker
People who showed up, there was a military January six, which has a huge impact on like, now, can I trust you? Cause I know cause you may have been in January six and they use the military IDs to get to the Kaplan and all of that. Um, and so when you start thinking about all of those things that you're seeing in the, in increased white nationalism that's happening in the, in the, in the, in the, in the military.
00:45:53
Speaker
We start to have the beginning to unpack that, that, that, that whiteness is property CRT tenant. I hope that makes sense. Oh my God. That was so interesting. I was also, I mean, just, I mean, you talked about DOD, but I also think about.
00:46:08
Speaker
The VA right and where if I mean you talked about medical like we need CRT needs to go look at medical, right? So it's like our people coming in sicker. Are there experiences in the military? You know making them more vulnerable because of the ways in which you know Health outcomes there's huge disparities even before you join the military, right?
Justifications for War in Democratic Societies
00:46:28
Speaker
So you're right It's just like rich to be looking across all of these places so interesting
00:46:33
Speaker
So there's a doctor in my unit that you just brought up around the VA. He works at the VA, and he's Korean. And he was treating, I guess, a Vietnam War vet. He was treating the Vietnam War vet, but the son came in, or the daughter, one of the children of the vet,
00:46:58
Speaker
came in and this really was giving this particular doctor a hard time because, you know, when you see someone who has the Asian facial features, they just automatically send them to their vet from Vietnam.
00:47:11
Speaker
And this particular doctor's not. And so again, looking at the racism, you're still looking at these whole generations of white service members who are coming from these rural places in the US, joining the military, who have ever limited with people who are not white, that are bringing some of those discourses into military spaces. And there is a diversity of training that you have when you go to basic training.
00:47:41
Speaker
At least it was when I went many moons ago. But my guess is it needs to be re updated, re updated because we're still experiencing some of the same things some 30 years later. So you brought up Vietnam and we have a few minutes left. So I was thinking maybe we could go back to Martin Luther King Jr's speech. And Leah, I wanted to throw a question your way, which is,
00:48:06
Speaker
just ask you if there was a passage or something, an idea in particular or 10 that stood out to you that maybe you wanted to bring out and talk about. So I don't know if I could go and quote a passage. I think the thing, my experience of reading this was you start off and he's like, I'm going to go through the seven reasons, like all people of faith should be opposed to this war. And you're like, man, he's good. He's like,
00:48:33
Speaker
And then it's like, he takes all that. And then he turns to this much more expansive critique that connects kind of, he says, we have to reframe our values that if our values are thing oriented, not people oriented, we are always going to be back in this place. And he really, and I, sorry, the way he's able to make a critique of capitalism and militarism,
00:49:00
Speaker
and racism, right? And he connects all of those ideas, but he's able to do that in a way where he specifically says, if we're going to be engaged in a war, wars against communism, right? Like we have to do this. So his, I'm not explaining this very well, but his ability to do that
00:49:18
Speaker
Um, we're, it'd be very easy to say, okay, he's talking about a kind of a socialist division, right? Like this is a, he, he's, he's rejecting kind of these isms, um, in what to me feel like a recognizably kind of left socialist frame, but he's doing this, like he's, he's just, he's really good. I know this is real breaking news alert. Um, Dr. King is a smart guy, but like he's able to do that and then make the case that, you know,
00:49:45
Speaker
that this is an alternative to communism, as opposed to in line with communism. I was really blown away by that. He says near the end, it's a small thing, but a nation that spends more each year on the military than social programs is approaching spiritual death. And I just think that this idea of spiritual death
00:50:06
Speaker
and like this worry about it. I mean, it feels, I mean, I think I wrote it, this is a Jeremiah, right? And that is a biblical prophet kind of vision, right? Like, I am worried about kind of what will happen to this society if we don't stop the war machine, right? I don't know, I just think that the ways that he goes from a specific critique of the Vietnam War
00:50:33
Speaker
to a larger diagnosis of what's wrong in American society and calls on us that even as Americans who can kind of retain a sense of peoplehood or nationhood, that we have to be in solidarity with people around the world and that are, you know, that I just, I think that that turn in this speech is really remarkable. Sorry, I don't have anything
00:51:01
Speaker
more coherent to say than that. But it's just, it is such an intellectual feat and it's such like a moral like clarion call, I guess. I love that, Leah. The passage that stuck out to me is similar to the one that sticks out to you. And I'm just going to read through it here a little bit.
00:51:22
Speaker
It is a sad fact that because of comfort, complacency, a morbid fear of communism and our proneness to adjust to injustice, the Western nations that initiated so much of the revolutionary spirit of the modern world have now become the arch anti-revolutionaries. This has driven many to feel that only Marxism has a revolutionary spirit. Therefore, communism is a judgment against our failure to make democracy real
00:51:50
Speaker
and follow through on the revolutions that we initiated. Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism. With this powerful commitment, we shall boldly challenge the status quo and unjust moors and thereby speed the day when every valley shall be exalted and every mountain and hill shall be made low
00:52:19
Speaker
and the crooked shall be made straight and the rough places plain. A genuine revolution of values means in the final analysis that our loyalties must become ecumenical rather than sectional. Every nation must now develop an overriding loyalty to mankind as a whole
00:52:36
Speaker
in order to preserve the best in their individual societies. So this, I mean, this is just incredible, right? So he's making an argument to some extent against the very things that have caused warfare over the last two centuries. Let's say this, this hyper nationalism, right? These, this is in part the thing that is driving a warfare, but it is also wrapped up in these histories of
00:53:04
Speaker
of racism and oppression as well. And he's saying we need to be ecumenical rather than sectional, meaning we need to look towards the global mankind rather than just our own interests while at the same time recognizing that we preserve what's best in our own individual societies.
King's Revolution of Values and Critique of Societal Structures
00:53:25
Speaker
So this is a pretty profound statement. And in 1967, a fairly radical statement as well.
00:53:34
Speaker
But also when you think about black folk in the military, and I'm often at odds with this myself, that I'm serving a nation that does not love me back, often.
00:53:48
Speaker
And so I think about when you think about, you know, you have veterans that come back from World War One that were lynching the uniforms in the South. You had the Tuskegee Airmen that were officers in the Air Force that couldn't go to the officers club or command white troops. And, you know, there were one year that we had our wars banquet. The theme was World War Two and it and I
00:54:12
Speaker
I threw a little bit of a fit. I said, because you do recognize in 1945, I couldn't command white troops. I must have been a major at the time. I can't remember. And so the command chief, who was the senior enlisted person on the base, who is a black guy, went to the wing commander and was like, oh, we need to rethink this. And they did rethink that. So again, going back to this whole conversation that people are open
00:54:36
Speaker
to these conversations. But my point to that with Jason, what you were saying, is that often, you know, you have black people who joined the military, not necessarily for love of country, but hoping the country will love them back.
00:54:55
Speaker
And so there were a lot of conversations and, you know, Benjamin B. O. Davis, Benjamin O. Davis talked about, you know, you cheer for us when, you know, you cheer for Jesse Owens when he, you know, beat, you know, was the beat. I can't even guy was running against in Germany.
00:55:15
Speaker
but then you don't give us an opportunity to show what we can do. You give us a fixed text, basically, and I'm paraphrasing from the movie. And so my point is that we're often, as service people of color, it's not necessarily a level of the country, it's just hoping the country will love us back. Yeah, I think this quote is just,
00:55:42
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, he kind of is holding Americans to task for, you know, our complacency that we have let go of this. He's reminding us that like edits in the abstract, like our ideals are very revolutionary, right? And that we have forsaken those and that, yeah, I just think that, you know, this idea that, and he's also, he's very like, we can do this, right? Like we can turn back these values, we can reorient
00:56:12
Speaker
our values to kind of be in, you know, worldwide fellowship is the phrase he uses. Yeah, this is interesting because this comes just in the wake of another famous speech in the 1960s, which is Stokely Carmichael's Black Power speech, which is dealing with a lot of the same issues. And we're not going to talk about that today.
00:56:35
Speaker
But we'll put it into the podcast so people can go listen to the speech. And while Dr. King and Stokely Carmichael are dealing with the same issues, they're approaching them from different perspectives and coming to different solutions. And so it's worth thinking about those two things being in dialogue with each other as well. Yeah.
00:57:00
Speaker
Sorry, I just was thinking about how in this speech he really I think the surprising turn to me and maybe I shouldn't have been surprised because I don't think this I think this kind of rhetoric was all over the anti war movement for Vietnam, but that he's really connecting kind of the opposition to the war in Vietnam.
00:57:19
Speaker
to kind of, you know, the class interests of like poor folks at home, right? Like that he's really saying like, you know, if you are anti-poverty and we have to think about this war as a war on poor people, and that we are both harming poor people abroad, but also he talks about like,
00:57:35
Speaker
we are not able to fully fund social programs. Here he talks about kind of the Great Society programs immediately start getting defunded. And that goes back to what Cleveland said to kind of start us all out, right? Which was that if we're, you know, you can't remove this, the Vietnam War from kind of the domestic politics that are happening at home. Like we have to think of those things in relationship to each other.
Poverty, Race, and Systemic Racism's Impact
00:58:01
Speaker
But, you know, it also goes back to, you know,
00:58:05
Speaker
You even see it now where you have social programs that are being cut. Indiana had a $6 billion surplus with no return of investment on the community and you wonder why there's this opioid epidemic or you understand why there's violence in the city the way it is.
00:58:24
Speaker
Because there's no investment in those communities, in the communities, regardless of phenotype, but just in communities, you know, the violence in black communities tend to get highlighted in the media. But I'm sure if you go to some of these all white communities, the violence is equally as high there as it is, just by the nature that just more white people in Indiana than there are black people.
00:58:46
Speaker
So my point to that is, to that point around why there's no been pushed around the poverty issue. It's because you have poor white people who recognize, while I may be poor, I'm white. And that gives me a certain leverage that I need to be able to do. When you look at some of these poor states, some of the poorest states in the nation,
00:59:11
Speaker
They could really, really benefit from some of these social programs that Dr. King talks about. It's all connected to racism. And you can't separate the two. I'm not saying that you are, but I just think people will listen to this and think about this broadly, that you have to think about the center of race and the whiteness and white supremacy in the way that it is controlling everybody.
00:59:38
Speaker
not just people of color. Well, it actually works the premise if, you know, it's designed, and this is not my quote, this is one of my colleagues' quote, it's really designed to control white people because they vote against things that they need, social programs, good school, healthcare, you know, et cetera, because they think, you know, there's a book called Dying of Whiteness where there's guys like, I'd rather be dead than making sure that some undocumented Mexican gets into healthcare.
Conclusion and Resources
01:00:07
Speaker
Well, we've come to the end of our time. So Cleveland, Leah, thank you so much for being with us today. Um, this is of course an important conversation and we've barely touched the surface of this conversation. Uh, but hopefully folks who are listening to this, we'll use this as a jumping point for their own conversations and continue it in their classrooms or in their coffee shops together. So again, thanks for joining us and we'll see you on the next episode. Thank you. Thank you.
01:00:39
Speaker
Thanks for listening to Justice and War in American History. Please stay tuned for our next episode, which you can find on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, or through any of your favorite podcast providers. Please be sure to rate the podcast and to be in touch with us if you have any questions or feedback. You can find more information about this podcast and the broader justice and war project at justiceandwarseminar.org.
01:01:03
Speaker
If you are a veteran or concerned about a veteran who has experienced a mental health crisis, there is 24-hour support through the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. Dial 988 and press 1 or text at 838255. For more information on support from the VA, visit mentalhealth.va.gov. And, as always, special thanks to the National Endowment for the Humanities for making this project possible.