06/04/2020
{I can’t make this any shorter, so please continue into comments.}
Before we decide to send the US military to target the Black Lives Matter movement and silence protesters. Let’s take a step back and think about how our country has treated black military veterans. Here is just a brief history of extreme violence and injustice against our black veterans that fought for our freedoms. I am only going to address time from the Civil War to WWII.
I will start by referencing Targeting Black Veterans: Lynching in America, “Between the end of Reconstruction and the years following World War II, the experience of military service for African Americans often inflamed an attitude of defiant resistance to the status quo that could prove deadly in a society where racial subordination was violently enforced. All throughout the American South, parts of the Midwest, and Northwest dozens of black veterans died at the hands of mobs and persons acting under the color of official authority; many survived near-lynchings; and thousands suffered severe assaults and social humiliation.”
So basically to be a soldier is to receive training in weapons, in organizations, in tactics: the skills of self-assertion. It is also to lay claim to the reverence that America sets aside for its former warriors. This terrified white America.
Just one terrifying example from the years after the civil war.
“At Bardstown in Nelson County, Kentucky, a mob brutally lynched a United States Colored Troops veteran,” we learn. “The mob stripped him of his clothes, beat him, and then cut off his s*xual organs. He was then forced to run half a mile to a bridge outside of town, where he was shot and killed.”
After the First World War black veterans were denied the benefits and disability pay they had been promised. Whites speculated they must have enjoyed wartime s*x with French women making them “dangerously lustful” for white women. In the years following the war 13 black veterans were lynched and dozens more survived whippings beatings, and shootings.
There is so much more but let’s continue to WWII. The war that gains so much pride for our country,
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