Black Soldiers Are Always Fighting Two Enemies

Black soldiers have to fight both America's enemies and home-grown racists.

For most of its existence, the U.S. Army mirrored the nation in a rather unpleasant way : its sanctioning of racial segregation. “Double Exposure: Fighting for Freedom,” published by D. Giles Limited in association with the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, documents the complex history of black soldiers, illuminating their triumphs and challenges.

“They demonstrate the willingness of a people to stand up and be counted, even when they were not fully recognised in the legal and social systems of their day. They give us a window from which to see a small sample of the hard work and sacrifice that African-Americans continue to pour into the greater life of the United States,” The retired Marine Maj. Gen. Charles F. Bolden Jr. wrote.

“Wartime creates some of the most trying circumstances a human being can endure and its crucible strips away all but the true essence of those who endure the heat of battle,” he added.

That is why Blacks don’t like wars, especially the wars, which nobody benefits from, the wars where you don’t have the right for your own judgement, the wars, where innocent civilians die in bigger amounts than the enemies, the wars of the white people…

White supremacists justify the killings of the civilians in occupied territories and the killinsgs of the African-Americans by police in the same manner.

Ajamu Baraka writes, “We must always remind ourselves that in the colonies of the world as well as the racialized, segregated communities in the capitalist metropolis, the non-white is seen as the living negation of everything deemed important to the European mind – the underclass, the violent, the welfare queens, gangbangers, the terrorists – the quintessence of evil… What this means is that we cannot afford the comforting myths of U.S. benevolence that attempt to conceal the naked deployment of U.S. state power in the service of Western capitalist/colonialist interests.”

“The current phase of naked aggression in Syria is not a reflection of U.S. strength but rather its weakness. Nonetheless, we cannot underestimate the threat that the continued reliance on militarism and repression poses for African-Americans and the peoples of the world.

In the U.S., the national security apparatus has been moving systematically to strengthen its ability to target, contain, disrupt and repress when necessary all domestic oppositional movements.

The threat of domestic terrorism provided the convenient cover for intensifying those efforts in the post-9/11 period, the result being graphically demonstrated by the militarized police in Boston and their police-state tactics in the aftermath of the Boston bombing, and in Ferguson, Missouri in response to a few hundred demonstrators protesting another killing of an unarmed Black person.”