Speaker 1: You're listening to Comedy Central. Hey, it's Roy. Quick note
Speaker 1: about today's episode of Beyond the Scenes. The subject of
Speaker 1: suicide and suicide attempts are discussed briefly, So if you
Speaker 1: want a tiptoe away from this episode, you can, and
Speaker 1: if you want to stay, let's get started. Hey, welcome
Speaker 1: to Beyond the Scenes, the podcast that goes a little
Speaker 1: deeper into segments and topics that originally aired on The
Speaker 1: Daily Show. But here's what this podcast like. This podcast
Speaker 1: is like when you were a kid and the bell
Speaker 1: rang for recess And now you're in the courtyard drinking
Speaker 1: your juice box and you're playing four square with your
Speaker 1: friend Aaron, who you're convinced is gonna be your most
Speaker 1: goodest best friend for the rest of your life. Then
Speaker 1: he moved away and he never told you goodbye. Still
Speaker 1: think about you, man, if you're out there, just there's
Speaker 1: no love. I'm sorry. What were we talking about? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm Roy Wood Jr. And in honor of Veterans Day,
Speaker 1: we're talking about a CPE time segment that honored the
Speaker 1: contributions of the black soldier rode the clip in World
Speaker 1: War One. The three hundred and sixty ninth Infantry Regiment
Speaker 1: fought so fiercely that the Germans called them the Harlem
Speaker 1: hell Fighters. And when a German says you know how
Speaker 1: to whoop ass, that means something. The Great War also
Speaker 1: provided many black fighters with their first chance to travel abroad,
Speaker 1: and once in France, our brothers in arms found something
Speaker 1: they had never seen before, respectful white people. It was
Speaker 1: so enjoyable in Europe that a lot of black soldiers
Speaker 1: didn't come back, which I understand. I went to Belgium
Speaker 1: for two days, ended up staying the whole summer with
Speaker 1: Helga and she knew how to iron that Belgian waffle.
Speaker 1: Oh my waffles. I was there for three months, and
Speaker 1: then my wife found out. I'm sorry, baby, Please please
Speaker 1: let me go home. Today I'm joined by the co
Speaker 1: founder of the Black Veterans Project and former infantry, combat
Speaker 1: medic and US Army veteran Richard Brookshire. Richard, how you doing.
Speaker 2: I'm doing good. I really have it to be here. Excited.
Speaker 1: Well, good to have you here. I'll tell you my
Speaker 1: Veterans Day story about the parade in high school where
Speaker 1: I stepped in a horse turret. But first let's welcome
Speaker 1: my second guests. They're a professor of history at Dartmouth
Speaker 1: College and author of the new book Half American, The
Speaker 1: epic story of African Americans fighting World War Two at
Speaker 1: home and abroad. Matthew F. Delmont, Matthew, thank you for
Speaker 1: joining us.
Speaker 3: Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1: It's good to be here, right, Oh well, a pleasure
Speaker 1: to have you all. And let's get into this discussion.
Speaker 1: You know, the contributions of veterans, I think are often
Speaker 1: minimized and remixed in our society, and done so even
Speaker 1: more for black veterans. Matthew, I like to start with you.
Speaker 1: Your book is titled half American. Talk to us a
Speaker 1: little bit about how you settled on the title of
Speaker 1: that book and what the experience was like for black
Speaker 1: service members in the military during that time, where you know,
Speaker 1: the racism and segregation was just as entrenched within our
Speaker 1: armed forces as it was in just general American society.
Speaker 4: So the title of the book, calf American comes from
Speaker 4: a letter that a man named James Thompson wrote in
Speaker 4: December nineteen forty one, shortly after the bombing of Pearl Harbor.
Speaker 4: Thompson writes a letter to the Pittsburgh Courier, which was
Speaker 4: the largest and most influential black newspaper at the time.
Speaker 4: What Thompson asks is, should I sacrifice my life to
Speaker 4: live half American? Is the America I know worth defending?
Speaker 4: What he's saying is he is a Black American. You
Speaker 4: think about what it means for him and other Black
Speaker 4: Americans to get drafted into a military that is entirely
Speaker 4: racially segrogated.
Speaker 3: The Army is serogated.
Speaker 4: It only particularly allows Black Americans to serve in supply
Speaker 4: and logistical roles, by and large, are not allowed to
Speaker 4: participate in combat. In the Navy, black Americans are all
Speaker 4: allowed to volunteer and be drafted into the messment branch,
Speaker 4: where they essentially will wait on and serve white officers,
Speaker 4: and at the start of the war, black Americans aren't
Speaker 4: all out in the Marine Corps at all. This is
Speaker 4: an affront to the patriotism and service of Black Americans
Speaker 4: that they want to be able to do everything they
Speaker 4: can to help protect their country, to serve the United
Speaker 4: States at this time of war, but the military doesn't
Speaker 4: do what they can to acknowledge their service and to
Speaker 4: take advantage of the skills that Black Americans can bring
Speaker 4: to the military.
Speaker 3: Effort.
Speaker 4: Once those black troops get drafted into the military, what
Speaker 4: they find is that conditions on those bases are just
Speaker 4: as bad, if not worse, than they aren't surrounding towns
Speaker 4: and cities in the country. Their stories abound of black
Speaker 4: troops being sent to these army camps in the South,
Speaker 4: and they're fearing for their lives. They get attacked by townspeople,
Speaker 4: they get verbally abused and physically harassed by white officers.
Speaker 4: They're called racial epithets every day. Things get so bad
Speaker 4: that they're actually anxious and excited about the prospect of
Speaker 4: being able to deploy to battlefronts in Europe with the
Speaker 4: Pacific because they think it's going to be safer there
Speaker 4: than it is in Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia.
Speaker 1: And they didn't start letting black troops in until after
Speaker 1: the war start. You know how races you've got to
Speaker 1: be to pas No, you can't for America. We'll do
Speaker 1: it first, Uh all right, we getting I asked, well,
Speaker 1: come on over here, black folks. All right, we won't
Speaker 1: go and let you in just a little. I'm not
Speaker 1: sure if that was the exact memo or how it
Speaker 1: was discussed, but it's definitely an interesting dichotomy in the
Speaker 1: sense that you want to have pride for something that
Speaker 1: is also you want to have pride in a place
Speaker 1: that is also you know, mistreating you Richard as a
Speaker 1: veteran when you enlisted, how much was the thought of
Speaker 1: the inequities that still trouble America? How much did that
Speaker 1: play a role in you choosing to enlist or even
Speaker 1: being hesitant to enlist initially?
Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean I think like the first thing I
Speaker 5: can think of is I joined shortly after Obama was elected,
Speaker 5: and so it was like this momentum, like we have
Speaker 5: a black you know, commander in chief, the first black president.
Speaker 5: So maybe there was something, Naiva say. I was also young,
Speaker 5: and young people tend to join. You're talking about even
Speaker 5: in World War Two, the predominant, like the majority of
Speaker 5: folks that were joining or were like nineteen and twenty
Speaker 5: and twenty one, These your young people, right, So I
Speaker 5: think I was naive around the inequities, and my story
Speaker 5: kind of bears out kind of all of the lessons
Speaker 5: learned over the last decade since I went to Afghanistan.
Speaker 1: And talking with other black soldiers. Was there any sense
Speaker 1: of community or is it kind of every man for
Speaker 1: himself when you're dealing with inequities within the armed services.
Speaker 2: I think it depends on where you end up getting stationed.
Speaker 5: When I was in training, I think that you know,
Speaker 5: we kind of congregated based off of race. I just
Speaker 5: naturally folks kind of gravitated to the folks that they
Speaker 5: were kind.
Speaker 2: Of wanting to be around.
Speaker 5: And then I ended up being stationed at a small
Speaker 5: base in Germany, a former Nazi base actually in bomb Holder, Germany,
Speaker 5: where it was predominantly white. I had only a few
Speaker 5: black soldiers that I could even befriend, let alone kind
Speaker 5: of build community with. And that was actually probably the
Speaker 5: beginning of the awakening, right because I was kind of
Speaker 5: thrust from going up. I was a student at Morehouse
Speaker 5: about a year and a half before, and then suddenly
Speaker 5: I dropped out of Morehouse and found myself at the
Speaker 5: middle of Bombholder, Germany around a bunch of Midwestern white boys,
Speaker 5: and it was just it was different. I remember that
Speaker 5: first like six months, that first six months going into
Speaker 5: the going into work, and like the kinds of conversations
Speaker 5: that these folks were like engaging in, like you know,
Speaker 5: they was just kind of skewing the things that they
Speaker 5: were hearing all Fox News. It was happening back in
Speaker 5: twenty and ten, right right right after Obama had got
Speaker 5: elected and.
Speaker 2: All those things. So it was discouraging.
Speaker 5: I remember coming to work and kind of like just
Speaker 5: was it was always kind of an awakening every single
Speaker 5: day with how ignorant folks could be, how prejudicial folks
Speaker 5: would be, how sexist and homophobic folk could be, let alone,
Speaker 5: how racist folks could be. So after about about six months,
Speaker 5: I just I stopped engaging in the dialogue because it
Speaker 5: was exhausting and I had to prepare to go to war,
Speaker 5: right and with these same people, right, So I felt
Speaker 5: like I was just kind of a losing battle to
Speaker 5: try to feel like I could change their minds or
Speaker 5: all they needed was one more conversation for me, or
Speaker 5: one more one more book to read, or one more
Speaker 5: book recommendation to you know, edify themselves. And you know,
Speaker 5: these folks aren't really interested in learning.
Speaker 1: How do you have like in upon and listening, How
Speaker 1: do you possess a sense of pride in something that
Speaker 1: is not fixed within that organization? Like if we just
Speaker 1: go with the Harlem Hill Fighters, right, all right, Harlemhill
Speaker 1: Fighters they go over to France during World War One,
Speaker 1: they whoop a lot of ass, they get a lot
Speaker 1: of metals, and then they come home and they can't
Speaker 1: even be in their own parade for the home coming
Speaker 1: to even celebrate that you made it back safely to America.
Speaker 1: And then you look at groups like the Tuskegee Airmen
Speaker 1: who had a lot of their accomplishments overlooked. And it
Speaker 1: was a long time before we really in my opinion,
Speaker 1: properly gay those brothers. They're flowers. So how much did
Speaker 1: you identify with the black person's relationship with the military
Speaker 1: of the past and reconcile that with the present? And
Speaker 1: you know, why are these black service members? Why are
Speaker 1: they so important to military history.
Speaker 4: I think what's powerful about black military service is that
Speaker 4: Black Americans have always been fighting two wars at the
Speaker 4: same time. They've been fighting for equality within the military,
Speaker 4: but they've also been trying to fight to make America
Speaker 4: actually up to its ideals. I think that's true in
Speaker 4: World War One with the hom heel fighters, It's true
Speaker 4: in World War Two with Tuski Airmen and all the
Speaker 4: more than million black Americans who served, And it's true
Speaker 4: after the military becomes deserogated. That even once military deserogates
Speaker 4: in nineteen forty eight and you see some improvements, the
Speaker 4: kind of military that Richer was a part of still
Speaker 4: has racial discrimination as a key part of it. It
Speaker 4: is still facing a lot of the challenges with regards
Speaker 4: to racism that are fully meshed in the culture of
Speaker 4: the military. And so I think is powerful about the
Speaker 4: fact that Black Americans have continued to serve the country
Speaker 4: is that they're truly demanding the country be a better
Speaker 4: version of itself. They are trying to articulate and trying
Speaker 4: to bring in into being a better version of the
Speaker 4: United States.
Speaker 1: And rich the same question to you, how did knowing
Speaker 1: those stories of the journey of black people through the military,
Speaker 1: you know, how much did you feel a connection to that?
Speaker 2: You know, early on, I.
Speaker 5: Think that it really actually happened after I'd gotten out.
Speaker 5: I came I came back, finished my last three years
Speaker 5: in the military. While I was kind of matriculating the
Speaker 5: beginning of the Black Lives Matter movement was kind of
Speaker 5: proliferating in the country. I was kind of struggling to
Speaker 5: reconcile my service. I wasn't connected to a lot of
Speaker 5: vets right, like even fewer vets that serve now that
Speaker 5: they did back then. So there wasn't a lot of
Speaker 5: community to discourse with or engage with. And it's really
Speaker 5: what was the impetus to my project was the desire
Speaker 5: to kind of better understand the inequities that were that.
Speaker 5: So I'll start with uh, you know, Unfortunately, I had
Speaker 5: a suicide attempt about a year after getting out of
Speaker 5: the military. Like I said, I was really really struggling
Speaker 5: to reconcile my service and you know PTSD that I'd
Speaker 5: had and just didn't feel like I was getting the
Speaker 5: support that I needed. And when I was in the
Speaker 5: psych world, we could didn't have TVs, we didn't have
Speaker 5: any you know, anything to engage. So I had people
Speaker 5: for bringing me books and I read a book called
Speaker 5: When Affirmative Action Was White, a book by Irakats Nelson,
Speaker 5: a professor out of Columbia, and there are two chapters
Speaker 5: in it that focused on the GI Bill And essentially
Speaker 5: this is wide social welfare program right after World War
Speaker 5: Two that enabled many people to gain access to zero
Speaker 5: VA back home asso, the ability by a home for
Speaker 5: the first time, to ability go to school, and it
Speaker 5: was the first time that I really like sat with the
Speaker 5: history that black folk were mostly locked out of that.
Speaker 5: So shortly after getting out the Psyche ward, I went
Speaker 5: to an event because I was unemployed and the event
Speaker 5: was for unemployed vets, and it just struck me that
Speaker 5: the majority of that room was black, and so for me,
Speaker 5: it was like, Yo, there's this history that I just
Speaker 5: engaged with. That's very clear. I'm in the midst of
Speaker 5: this Black Lives Matter movement, the ascension of Trump is happening,
Speaker 5: trying to figure out how I can be of utility
Speaker 5: and reconcile my service. And then I'm seeing, like, you know,
Speaker 5: get to googling for a couple of weeks, trying to
Speaker 5: do research and seeing that there's really no this history
Speaker 5: isn't connected to the present day, and how can we
Speaker 5: be having a racial justice conversation as a country and
Speaker 5: it seems not to be happening in this institution which
Speaker 5: historically has always had a race problem.
Speaker 2: And then kind of talking about some of my experiences.
Speaker 5: As well, I was beginning to connect the dots in
Speaker 5: like this invisible kind of issue of race still permeating
Speaker 5: in the military, and wanting to do a project that
Speaker 5: would really kind of tie the historical threat for people
Speaker 5: and make things plain and simple.
Speaker 2: And so that's what we've really been trying to do
Speaker 2: for the last five years.
Speaker 1: Let's talk a little bit about that for a second,
Speaker 1: because your time in the army, you know, after that,
Speaker 1: you wrote a New York Times article a couple of
Speaker 1: years ago entitled Serving in the Army as a queer
Speaker 1: black Man opened my eyes to racism in America. Now,
Speaker 1: within your time enlisted, were you openly queer and if not,
Speaker 1: what type of layers did that add to being within
Speaker 1: the military.
Speaker 5: I came out when I was sixteen, and I think
Speaker 5: part of even my experiences at Morehouse is trying to
Speaker 5: reconcile what that meant, right to be a young black
Speaker 5: man and to be gay. So I came in with
Speaker 5: a good sense of myself and I think that's partly
Speaker 5: why I survived the military and then but I had
Speaker 5: I came in at the height of donational hotel. I
Speaker 5: couldn't be out, you know, in the military, and that
Speaker 5: was something that I was aware of going into it.
Speaker 5: But it took about two years between training and that
Speaker 5: first year being at my duty station getting ready for war,
Speaker 5: and you know, ultimately, you know, you know, only hide
Speaker 5: so much, right, And so I was facing a lot
Speaker 5: of sexual harassment a lot of folks. It kind of
Speaker 5: rumors were floating in the way and way in which
Speaker 5: people were engaging with me. And on top of I
Speaker 5: think like some racist based actions and like just some
Speaker 5: some things that a lot of black folks face when
Speaker 5: they're like, you know, significantly diminished or like, uh, they're not,
Speaker 5: We're not We're not mentored.
Speaker 2: In the same ways. We're kind of set up for
Speaker 2: failure in a lot of ways.
Speaker 5: So I definitely think like me being gay played a
Speaker 5: role up until that point. But right before I went
Speaker 5: a deployment, I was like, yo, I might go to
Speaker 5: Afghanistan and die. So I'm not about to go there
Speaker 5: without folks, you know, the people that I'm working with
Speaker 5: directly knowing that you know, I'm gay and I'm not
Speaker 5: something that I'm ashamed of. So I came out to
Speaker 5: my to my direct unit, the folks that I was
Speaker 5: working with, specifically the physicians because I was a combat
Speaker 5: medic and my other medics, and they were largely supportive, right,
Speaker 5: but I was also it just it just so happened
Speaker 5: that a policy had passed where they do Na's hotel
Speaker 5: was still in place, but it was under review and
Speaker 5: so they weren't kicking anybody actively out right, And it's
Speaker 5: just that that window of time, and then the policy
Speaker 5: actually changed on my birthday in Afghanistan, about nine months
Speaker 5: into my deployment.
Speaker 1: Did you here's here's a here's a here's a personal question,
Speaker 1: but I feel compelled to ask it. By dealing with
Speaker 1: discrimination from sexual orientation and then dealing with discrimination well
Speaker 1: sexual orientation rumors and then dealing with racial discrimination, you
Speaker 1: would combat medic. Did you regret signing up for the
Speaker 1: one mos that requires you to maybe help somebody that
Speaker 1: might have been talking shit to you the day before
Speaker 1: on base.
Speaker 5: I never resented being a combat metic because I think
Speaker 5: I got.
Speaker 1: To if you never had a moment where you're like,
Speaker 1: these are the people I got to save if they
Speaker 1: get shot.
Speaker 5: No, I mean, I would say one of the most
Speaker 5: racist people that I engaged with was actually a physician
Speaker 5: that was in charge of all of us.
Speaker 2: Right, So you know.
Speaker 5: I remember Martin Luther King day and I'm a morehouse man.
Speaker 5: Sometimes Martin Luther King's on TV. I want to give
Speaker 5: him a shout out. And it was playing in our
Speaker 5: age station, and he was like, turn that troublemaker off,
Speaker 5: and he literally like what he said.
Speaker 2: Right, and he said that it was like something out
Speaker 2: of a movie. I was like, what is happening?
Speaker 5: Because he started talking about how Martin Luther came down
Speaker 5: there and he was older, older gentleman, he came down
Speaker 5: to keep us from Alabama and said it came down
Speaker 5: and made all this trouble and my mammy got all
Speaker 5: worked up. And he was talking. He basically had he
Speaker 5: had a mammy. I never met someone who had one,
Speaker 5: but he had.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 5: It was just like something like that, right, But here's
Speaker 5: somebody in charge of like the career trajectory of these soldiers,
Speaker 5: let alone the kinds of engagements that we might have
Speaker 5: with the soldiers of color, queer folks, whatever, local Afghan
Speaker 5: populations and what have you. So, yeah, that opened my eyes,
Speaker 5: but I never regretted being a combat medic. At the
Speaker 5: end of the day, helping people is helping people.
Speaker 1: So you ain't you ain't never seen somebody that was
Speaker 1: on the battlefield messed up and then you just walk
Speaker 1: up to.
Speaker 2: Never had the opportunity.
Speaker 5: Nah, nah, let me just stop right there.
Speaker 1: Matthew before we go to the break. You know, everybody
Speaker 1: talks about the struggles of the black man. But if
Speaker 1: the black man got it bad on the Monday and
Speaker 1: the Tuesday, then the black and get it bad all week.
Speaker 1: Who were some of the other unsung black military heroes
Speaker 1: in the military during that time, particularly black women. Let's
Speaker 1: take a moment to educate people on you know, just
Speaker 1: not only what was necessarily going on on the front
Speaker 1: lines with black men, but also with black women in
Speaker 1: any and all support capacities, if not combat.
Speaker 4: So within the military, there were thousands of black women
Speaker 4: that participated in the Women's Army Corps. The largest group
Speaker 4: was a group called the six hundred and eighty eighth
Speaker 4: Central Postal Director of Itttalian that was under the command
Speaker 4: of Major Charity Adams. And this group's job, once I
Speaker 4: got sent to England in nineteen forty four, was to
Speaker 4: distribute mail throughout the European theater, which is actually a
Speaker 4: really difficult thing to do because you had troops moving
Speaker 4: all the time.
Speaker 3: These tudents were moving.
Speaker 4: Back and forth across across France and Germany as the
Speaker 4: as ors progressing, and he had a lot of guys
Speaker 4: with common names, so they were trying to determine which
Speaker 4: Bob Jones was receiving this mail or which Tom Johnson
Speaker 4: was receiving this mail. But they developed these systems to
Speaker 4: get mailed distributed throughout the European theater and ended up
Speaker 4: moving about sixty five thousand pieces of male per day
Speaker 4: throughout the European theater. It was really important for true morale.
Speaker 4: Both black and white soldiers talked about the importance of
Speaker 4: receiving male from home in terms of morale, But those
Speaker 4: black women had to face the kind of racism and
Speaker 4: sexism they would have been countered in the United States
Speaker 4: as well, and so in terms of where they could
Speaker 4: stay when they were in England, they had to fight
Speaker 4: to get access to hotels, get fight to get access
Speaker 4: to the Red Cross aid stations, and so every step
Speaker 4: for them was a battle within the military. But they
Speaker 4: performed extremely important role in industry being the male throughout
Speaker 4: the European theater. On the home front, there are more
Speaker 4: than a million Black Americans participated in defense industries, and
Speaker 4: six hundred thousand of them were black women. And for them,
Speaker 4: the war industry has really opened up important job opportunities
Speaker 4: that just weren't there before the war. By and large,
Speaker 4: black women had opportunities outside the home only either in
Speaker 4: agricultural work or being domestic servants for white families. And
Speaker 4: so a lot of these black women war workers. Essentially,
Speaker 4: they were like black Rosie derivats. They said, the war
Speaker 4: is what got them out of white people's kitchens. And
Speaker 4: so those again were month by month, week by week
Speaker 4: battles to get access these really well paid and important
Speaker 4: war jobs. So black women's work was crucial to winning
Speaker 4: the war.
Speaker 1: Well, after the break, I want to talk a little
Speaker 1: bit about you know, we've talked a little bit about
Speaker 1: what the military was like, and we've gone a little
Speaker 1: bit of what it was like specifically for you, But
Speaker 1: I want to talk about what the military is doing
Speaker 1: right now to try and in some of this discrimination,
Speaker 1: and what other veterans are dealing with once they're on
Speaker 1: the other side of their military service. This is beyond
Speaker 1: the scenes. We'll be right back. Beyond the scenes. We
Speaker 1: are back. We are talking about what it means to
Speaker 1: be black in the military, black man in the military,
Speaker 1: black and quer LGBTQIA plus in the military, what it
Speaker 1: means to be a black woman in the military, and
Speaker 1: we were talking, you know, during the break there, Richard,
Speaker 1: just a little bit. Also not only how black women
Speaker 1: were dealing with so many issues in trying to help
Speaker 1: the military during that time, but it seems that a
Speaker 1: lot of the issues that affected men also intersected with
Speaker 1: them as well.
Speaker 5: Absolutely, one of the things that a lot of people
Speaker 5: don't know or that black women under the policies that
Speaker 5: don't ask, don't tell, were disproportionately affected. There's a new
Speaker 5: study that is getting ready to be published that shows
Speaker 5: that women broadly or in the last five years have
Speaker 5: been up to four to five times more likely to
Speaker 5: get a dishonorable discharge or other than honorable discharge, meaning
Speaker 5: they're getting into the military and leaving without access to
Speaker 5: their benefits. There's still a wide variety of issue around
Speaker 5: sexual assault in the military, and the military hasn't done
Speaker 5: a good job of really forthrightly addressing that issue. And
Speaker 5: so you have all not only just discrimination kind of
Speaker 5: rearing its ugly head, but all these other issues and
Speaker 5: ways in which black women can and are marginalized that
Speaker 5: are often invisible to folks.
Speaker 1: Yeah, then let's stay right there in that pocket, Matthew,
Speaker 1: because I've always joke, isn't the right world. But I've
Speaker 1: always said on stage that you know something going wrong
Speaker 1: in the military because they got their own court and
Speaker 1: they own jail. What of the job, you know, got
Speaker 1: their own jail. In line, damn is everybody breaking the rules?
Speaker 1: So how does the legacy of racism and white supremacy,
Speaker 1: how does that still haunt our military today?
Speaker 4: Well, I think there's a through line in terms of
Speaker 4: how criminal justice works in the military, how it's worked historically,
Speaker 4: and how it works in the present.
Speaker 3: In the World War two time period.
Speaker 4: To pick up on what Richard was just saying, one
Speaker 4: of the ways that black Americans were treated unfairly was
Speaker 4: what they called blue discharges. These were written on blue paper,
Speaker 4: but they essentially kicked people out of the military without
Speaker 4: having to go through the court martial process for black
Speaker 4: troops who they considered to be troublemakers. And so the
Speaker 4: two primary populations that received these blue discharges were gay
Speaker 4: and lesbian troops at the time because that wasn't allowed
Speaker 4: during World War Two, and then black troops. Anyone who
Speaker 4: organized or pushed back against the kind of racist treatment
Speaker 4: they're receiving on base would received one of these discharges,
Speaker 4: and that was a lesson honorable discharge, which meant that
Speaker 4: they had no access to the benefits that they had
Speaker 4: earned and worked for during the war. Fast forward into
Speaker 4: the present and a lot of those same issues remain
Speaker 4: with regards to how military justices carried out along lines
Speaker 4: of race. I think this is where you see as
Speaker 4: much as the military has progressed, and I think there
Speaker 4: have been significant aspects of progress from the World War
Speaker 4: two area to the present, it's still in sitution that
Speaker 4: has a lot of the existing racial prejudices of the
Speaker 4: nation that in many ways it can't not have those
Speaker 4: when you're bringing together this wide cross section of demographics, race, gender,
Speaker 4: sexuality from all across the country. If you get people
Speaker 4: in power who have pre existing racial biases, that's going
Speaker 4: to lead to disparate and unequal treatment for people of
Speaker 4: color in particular once they're in the military, and you
Speaker 4: see it reflected in the kind of legal punishments and
Speaker 4: court martials and other less and hounimble discharges that the
Speaker 4: black troops continue to get today.
Speaker 1: We were talking at work about the NFL and black coaches,
Speaker 1: right and how that's a problem in terms of having
Speaker 1: more black coaches means that there has to be changes
Speaker 1: at the top higher than the level of coach. So
Speaker 1: that's GM, team president, owner or league officials. Right, So
Speaker 1: when you talk about eliminating racism, that's structural and institutional.
Speaker 1: How much of this falls on people, Let's just say
Speaker 1: at the Pentagon level to stop with, Like if you
Speaker 1: look at like, say January six right, January sixth, I
Speaker 1: think it was like over twenty people that were active military,
Speaker 1: not like for military.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, not like.
Speaker 1: You got radicalized later after you let no, you was
Speaker 1: just at base yesterday. I'd be right back, Lieutenant got
Speaker 1: to run down to DC for some of the January's,
Speaker 1: I'd be right back. Yet, Like, how do you adjudicate that,
Speaker 1: how do you punish that? How do you regulate that
Speaker 1: when it's so ingrained, when you have monuments named after
Speaker 1: all of these Confederate generals? Like how do you stay
Speaker 1: And I hear you breathing already, Like how do you
Speaker 1: change any of this culture? Where the solution even begin?
Speaker 2: It's complex?
Speaker 5: Right, I think that we're the focus of the project
Speaker 5: that I've been tearing out of the course of the
Speaker 5: last few years has been is looking at the history first,
Speaker 5: and so you know, kind of focus almost exclusively on
Speaker 5: veteran affairs issues like these, the harms that have been
Speaker 5: done when it comes to the military itself, like race
Speaker 5: is a factor from recruitment to retirement, and there are
Speaker 5: multi faceted prongs when you have conversations about how to
Speaker 5: address those things. Right, So let's just take recruitment for instance,
Speaker 5: we know, based off of the geospatial map study that
Speaker 5: was done on the city of San Diego, the majority
Speaker 5: of recruitment that was happening in black neighborhoods were for
Speaker 5: service oriented roles, right in low skill, low age really roles,
Speaker 5: and they were recruiting officers from white, affluent neighborhoods.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 5: So we haven't been able to strapolate that study outward
Speaker 5: to see what's happening in other cities, but we can
Speaker 5: kind of take that as a model.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 5: We know that just within the military itself has a
Speaker 5: broken equal unemployment opportunity system, right, the ways in which
Speaker 5: folks can make complaint plaints and adjudicate complaints without fear
Speaker 5: of retribution. The statistics show that folks don't try that process.
Speaker 2: Trust.
Speaker 5: Folks don't trust that system, right, So you're getting funneled
Speaker 5: into the military, oftentimes with only access to kind of
Speaker 5: service oriented roles. You have the academies. Really that these
Speaker 5: military academies, which more of the top brass, end up
Speaker 5: kind of being funneled through. You have a race issue
Speaker 5: really with recruitment and the ways in which they target
Speaker 5: black populations to attend those schools.
Speaker 2: So that ends up having impact thirty.
Speaker 5: Or forty years down the line when these people become
Speaker 5: the heads and leaders of the military, and then you
Speaker 5: have a white nationalist problem in the country. You know,
Speaker 5: the Pentagon doesn't want to be forthright and honest about
Speaker 5: right and the ways in which they tackle it because
Speaker 5: there is a very uncomfortable discourse around what does that mean?
Speaker 5: Around politics? Because what I found and the ways in
Speaker 5: which people were being radicalized. And I tell this this
Speaker 5: story because it's an important one. Like I served on
Speaker 5: a former Nazi based in Germany. Right, it was not
Speaker 5: uncommon to see people walking around with mind Coft and
Speaker 5: reading it like for leisure.
Speaker 1: Right, just white like sports illustrated.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yes, yes, And and there were folks that were
Speaker 5: just in you know, and they would say, oh, I'm.
Speaker 1: Just interested because not like a book on tape nothing
Speaker 1: like a kindle.
Speaker 5: I mean, for all I know they have they had
Speaker 5: all those things. But yeah, bringing it to work and
Speaker 5: reading it, it was it was normal.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 5: Fast forward four years, I'm getting out, I'm going to work.
Speaker 5: One day, shortly after getting out the military, I pull
Speaker 5: pull up on a paper and I realized there was
Speaker 5: a gentleman who we'd gone to basic training at the
Speaker 5: same place at the same time. I never I don't
Speaker 5: believe I've met this person, but we ended up being
Speaker 5: stationed at bomb Holder, which is a very small base
Speaker 5: in Germany at the same time, in the same unit,
Speaker 5: deploying to Afghanistan at the same time, getting out of
Speaker 5: the military at the same time. You know, fast forward
Speaker 5: three years. He becomes a white nationalist, comes to New
Speaker 5: York to murder a black person, just a random black person. Radicalized, right,
Speaker 5: And to me, that's when everything started to I started
Speaker 5: to connect the dots more that, like, you know, the
Speaker 5: radicalization that's happening.
Speaker 2: In the military.
Speaker 5: Conspiracy theories were rampant in the military. Like I literally
Speaker 5: would be talking to commanders and they'd be talking about like, oh,
Speaker 5: FEMA camps are real, and like you know, and these
Speaker 5: are people that are entrusted with thousands of you know,
Speaker 5: the leadership of thousands.
Speaker 2: Of people, potentially hundreds of people.
Speaker 5: So you know, it's just, yeah, a radicalization in the
Speaker 5: in the in the in the in the army is
Speaker 5: really I think the big issue. But I look at
Speaker 5: like something someone like Bishop Garrison. He got appointed last year, uh,
Speaker 5: an appointment the first of its kind to report directly
Speaker 5: to the Secretary of Defense, and he lasted less than
Speaker 5: a year in that position, a black man who was
Speaker 5: appointed to oversee uh, you know, uh, the issues around race,
Speaker 5: the issues around diversity and inclusion, and within a year
Speaker 5: he's being kind of pushed out it. You know, I
Speaker 5: you know, it's there's no easy solution, but there has
Speaker 5: to be a willingness to have the conversation.
Speaker 2: And that's that's.
Speaker 5: Something that's continuously pushed off because race still plays a
Speaker 5: major role, right, a major role for folks, and and
Speaker 5: they want to they want to keep that racial hierarchy,
Speaker 5: and there are folks in the military that that abide by.
Speaker 4: There's deep historical roots for this as well. So there
Speaker 4: were countless stories of black troops during World War Two
Speaker 4: who saw white troops run up the Confederate flag either
Speaker 4: alongside or instead of the star stripes. Once they took
Speaker 4: over these towns in France, and you just have to
Speaker 4: stop and imagine, like, what.
Speaker 3: Did that feel like?
Speaker 4: That's what that look like to these black troops to
Speaker 4: see their fellow soldiers or their white countrymen praised the
Speaker 4: Confederate flag and they absolutely knew what they were doing, right,
Speaker 4: both sides did that. Everyone understood that was a signal
Speaker 4: for slavery and for a racial hierarchy that could be
Speaker 4: traced back to the Jim Crow South. Part of what
Speaker 4: was important about the military finally desegregated in nineteen forty
Speaker 4: eight is they recognized that racism and sererogation made the
Speaker 4: military a less effective fighting force. That during the war,
Speaker 4: surrogation was stupid. It made no sense strategically right, you
Speaker 4: were doing everything in duplicated. It was justly complicated. They
Speaker 4: were segregating blood from white and black blood donors, even
Speaker 4: though there's.
Speaker 3: No scientific basis to do that.
Speaker 4: It's not because of political correctness or anything else that
Speaker 4: led them to desegrogated. It was due to intense political
Speaker 4: pressure from black activist but also to the fact that
Speaker 4: military leaders finally identified that we can take better advantage
Speaker 4: of the man power of the country if we actually
Speaker 4: are integrated. That they were turning away black Americans with PhDs,
Speaker 4: with language skills, with degrees from Harvard because they didn't
Speaker 4: want to have black Americans serving in certain units. And
Speaker 4: so I think to Richard's point, there's been a lot
Speaker 4: of backtracking in the last couple of decades that one
Speaker 4: thing that comes out of Vietnam is you have once
Speaker 4: the military becomes an all volunteer force, you start to
Speaker 4: see vastly more numbers of Black Americans and Latin X
Speaker 4: Americans participating in the military. You see many more minorities
Speaker 4: in the military in the past three decades, but you
Speaker 4: also see the development of a very intense and increasingly
Speaker 4: public white nationalists strain in the military, and it's hard
Speaker 4: for the military to have both those things coexist. You
Speaker 4: can't ask people of color to serve disproportionately to the
Speaker 4: percentage of the population while also still cultivating and not
Speaker 4: doing anything to counteract an intense white nationalist thread in
Speaker 4: the military. Think, if there's any hope for where the
Speaker 4: military might go in the future, it's trying to recognize
Speaker 4: that it's really mission critical for the military to be
Speaker 4: a space where racism isn't part of the day to
Speaker 4: day culture that you want this to be a space
Speaker 4: we're all Americans who choose to serve can do so proudly.
Speaker 2: I want to say one more thing. Racism is a spectrum.
Speaker 5: Right, you have white nationalists, but you also have the
Speaker 5: everyday person who might have racial biases. But the way
Speaker 5: that they move, the way that they engage compounds over
Speaker 5: time and affects a black person's career, potentially in the military.
Speaker 2: Right, So when we.
Speaker 5: Have these conversations about racism, it's often like it kind
Speaker 5: of very easily goes to the white nationalists conversation when
Speaker 5: like the everyday racial bias and the attempts to try
Speaker 5: to intervene in that with education are being intervened, right
Speaker 5: or not being taken seriously. And I think what happened
Speaker 5: at West Point last year was a perfect example. When
Speaker 5: there was a class being stood up to essentially kind
Speaker 5: of engage with the concepts of seeing critical race theory.
Speaker 5: It ended up on the Congressional floor, right with like
Speaker 5: members decrying that like, how dare we try to see
Speaker 5: to teach the former leaders of our military about the
Speaker 5: history of racist country and the systemic ways in which
Speaker 5: it shows up. And so anyway, I just wanted to
Speaker 5: put that in a conversation about racism being a spectrum.
Speaker 1: On the other side of your military career when you retire,
Speaker 1: and we've kind of raised the surface a little bit,
Speaker 1: but let's stick in on this. What are some of
Speaker 1: the inequities and the types of benefits black veterans have
Speaker 1: received throughout history. My uncle is an army veteran and
Speaker 1: God bless him, this man and spent about the last
Speaker 1: five six years trying to prove that he has what
Speaker 1: they don't think he has. And he keeps getting sent
Speaker 1: to every single VA doctor that ain't got an appointment,
Speaker 1: and it ain't get well. You had to get a
Speaker 1: second opin, got to do this paper. It's just a
Speaker 1: long ass dance. And not only what are the inequities
Speaker 1: that black veterans have received throughout history, but what impact
Speaker 1: has that had on veterans' access to housing and education
Speaker 1: and healthcare and just just general economic opportunities.
Speaker 4: Historically it's had a huge impact. So the GI Bill
Speaker 4: was perhaps the most important piece of legislation in our
Speaker 4: nation's history. It's what enabled a whole generation of white
Speaker 4: veterans to come back and enter the middle class, to
Speaker 4: be able to raise themselves up and raise their families
Speaker 4: up because it provided access to low interest via backed
Speaker 4: home mortgages, provide access to college tuition benefits, loans, be
Speaker 4: able to start businesses, and range of healthcare benefits and
Speaker 4: other benefits as well. But the way that legislation was written,
Speaker 4: it was largely authored by Southern Democratic politicians who are surrogationists,
Speaker 4: and so they made sure that legislation was distributed not
Speaker 4: at the federal level, but at the state and the
Speaker 4: local level, which meant that these local VA officials could discriminate,
Speaker 4: discriminate once black veterans came into these local offices, and
Speaker 4: so we have countless stories from nineteen forty six forty
Speaker 4: seven of black veterans going to their local branches and
Speaker 4: just getting the run around, either being denied outright or
Speaker 4: being steered into vocational programs. And what they're trying to
Speaker 4: do is go to a four year college. They're being
Speaker 4: told that they can't use benefits for certain reasons, and
Speaker 4: in terms of mortgages, probably the largest portion of the
Speaker 4: benefits all across the country, black veterans find it impossible
Speaker 4: to get mortgages to live in the majority of neighborhoods.
Speaker 4: It's true in New York and New Jersey, it's true
Speaker 4: in California. That has a dire long term impact in
Speaker 4: terms of the racial wealth gap. There's a group at
Speaker 4: Brandei's University called the Institute for Economic and Racial Equity
Speaker 4: that's been running some studies to try to calculate what
Speaker 4: the long term impact of this is. And what they
Speaker 4: found is that black veterans benefits from the GI Bill.
Speaker 4: For World War Two vets was only worth about forty
Speaker 4: percent of what white veterans got, and over a lifetime
Speaker 4: that was about one hundred thousand dollars per veteran. Now
Speaker 4: you can imagine what that means in terms what black
Speaker 4: veterans from World War Two could pass on to their families.
Speaker 4: When you look at what should be very upsetting numbers
Speaker 4: in terms of the racial wealth gap in the country,
Speaker 4: a huge part of that can be traced back to
Speaker 4: the GI Bill. And so historically this is really a
Speaker 4: fulcrum point in terms of how the country either could
Speaker 4: have moved closer to racial equity in terms of wealth
Speaker 4: the way their policy was written.
Speaker 3: We moved in the other directions.
Speaker 4: So the GI Bill opened up gaps between veterans that
Speaker 4: shouldn't have been their base on their service.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and to piggyback off that, I think Matthew and
Speaker 5: I had a discussion last week. He had mentioned that,
Speaker 5: and I never really thought about it, but it makes
Speaker 5: perfect sense because a lot of folks assumed that Okay,
Speaker 5: well they weren't able to go to white schools with
Speaker 5: the GI bill, but there was an infrastructure at HPCs
Speaker 5: to absorb the number of black vets that were returning.
Speaker 5: And so what you had was not only this stripping
Speaker 5: of generational wealth that could be passed down through home loans,
Speaker 5: but also the disappearance of a professional class that could
Speaker 5: have arised from you know, access to college education in maths.
Speaker 5: So really for the first time, and I think that
Speaker 5: has a direct correlation to the industrialization, what we see
Speaker 5: in inner cities throughout the fifties and sixties and seventies,
Speaker 5: and urban plight. It has a direct correlation because that
Speaker 5: generational wealth compounded, the ability to be able to educate.
Speaker 2: Yourself out of circumstance compounded.
Speaker 5: And then I like to start around Vietnam, like you know,
Speaker 5: go from World War two to Vietnam, the nation's first
Speaker 5: fully integrated war, and Black vets were disproportionately being kicked
Speaker 5: out of the military continuously, over one hundred thousand of
Speaker 5: them kicked out without access to the benefits.
Speaker 2: We've been talking.
Speaker 5: Predominantly about the GI Bill, right, which is a huge
Speaker 5: social welfare program, very important, but disability compensation is another
Speaker 5: avenue of income in the thousands of dollars potentially a
Speaker 5: month that folks are not getting access to.
Speaker 2: And we were able to prove that there.
Speaker 5: Was a statistically significant disparity with respect to the denial
Speaker 5: rates that black vets were facing, and one of which
Speaker 5: were that over the our five year period from twenty
Speaker 5: fifteen to twenty twenty, black veterans were almost thirty percent
Speaker 5: less likely to get disability for something like PTSD. And
Speaker 5: that's just in the most recent conflict, right, So we're
Speaker 5: going to the same wars and dealing with like all
Speaker 5: the things that you just said, discrimination and lack of
Speaker 5: access to genuine opportunity, and that has a psychological effect
Speaker 5: as well.
Speaker 2: But these things aren't being taken serious when you go
Speaker 2: to the VA to.
Speaker 5: Talk about like I have PTSD, and it might look
Speaker 5: different from a white VET, or maybe it does look
Speaker 5: the same as a white FET. But I'm still being
Speaker 5: denied this disability compensation. And so the case that's getting
Speaker 5: prepared now is actually a gentleman who served Vietnam by
Speaker 5: the name of Conly Monk, who I think is one
Speaker 5: of the most important black vets in modern American history.
Speaker 5: He served two tours of Vietnam, got kicked out his
Speaker 5: last month in his second tour. He went from the
Speaker 5: age of nineteen to twenty one, serving two tours in
Speaker 5: the Vietnam. Like I said, he was from New Haven,
Speaker 5: and a white superior called him the end word. He
Speaker 5: got in a physical altercation. Forty years later, he still
Speaker 5: doesn't have access to his benefits. Five years ago, in
Speaker 5: twenty fifteen, he was six years ago, he was able
Speaker 5: to win a landmark case with YEAH that gave anyone
Speaker 5: who had been discharged a dishonorable discharge or other denominal discharge,
Speaker 5: who had post traumatic stress disorder or traumatic brain injury
Speaker 5: access to their benefits. What that means in real time
Speaker 5: is that they compensated him for three years of the
Speaker 5: back pay that they owed him, but they still owe
Speaker 5: him from all the pay that he didn't get all
Speaker 5: the way from nineteen seventy one, right, So now he
Speaker 5: is levying a suit against the VA, and his brother
Speaker 5: is suing on behalf of their deceased father who was
Speaker 5: a World War Two vetter and didn't get access to
Speaker 5: the GI bill. Because another thing that we don't talk
Speaker 5: about is service is also intergenerational, So you have the
Speaker 5: same families often being stripped of access to these benefits
Speaker 5: and then it being compounded over time.
Speaker 1: And so, yeah, Richard, you were fortunate in the sense
Speaker 1: that your mother took you in after your suicide attempt
Speaker 1: and was there to be an integral part in your
Speaker 1: growth and helping you out of the PTSD and helping
Speaker 1: you out of the depression and helping you back into
Speaker 1: the world of employment. There are a lot of veterans
Speaker 1: that do not have that type of care and concern
Speaker 1: within their family tree. How has the VA failed Black
Speaker 1: veterans in the scope of just mental health? Like, at
Speaker 1: any point before your suicide attempt, did you ever feel like, well,
Speaker 1: maybe I should just go to the VA, and then
Speaker 1: a voice in your hair going, nah, they ain't gonna
Speaker 1: be able to do shit. Was there ever hesitant? See
Speaker 1: did you go to the VA. Did you seek out
Speaker 1: mental health services before the suicide attempt? Or was the
Speaker 1: attempt the first fissure you know in your stability at that.
Speaker 5: Time, I did. I didn't know that I had PTSD,
Speaker 5: but I went to the VA. I sat down with
Speaker 5: a psychologist there and was basically told that I had
Speaker 5: something called adjustment disorder, which I don't know what that is,
Speaker 5: but talked to people since they were like, well, that's
Speaker 5: a form of PTSD, but a lot of that's a
Speaker 5: term that they basically used to say, oh, well, we
Speaker 5: can't really help, you don't have a lot of resources
Speaker 5: or whatever.
Speaker 2: I just felt sidelined.
Speaker 5: It took so much courage to try to go and
Speaker 5: actually have the conversation, because you know, people are proud.
Speaker 5: I'm a proud person, and I didn't want to admit
Speaker 5: that I had something wrong, especially being a combat medic,
Speaker 5: because I got to see folks who were really messed up, right,
Speaker 5: So in my mind, I'm like, well, I'm not a
Speaker 5: mess up as them, so I'm gonna be okay, I'm
Speaker 5: gonna go figure it out. But I went and was
Speaker 5: dismissed and then found myself even in what led to
Speaker 5: my suicide attempt was then they started. They gave me
Speaker 5: an antidepressant, which in the law tim I found out
Speaker 5: I was bipolar, but they gave me an anti depression
Speaker 5: that made it ten times worse and that which led
Speaker 5: to my attempt. So it was just like mismanagement kind
Speaker 5: of all around because the things that I was expressing
Speaker 5: and trying to make plane wasn't being taken seriously.
Speaker 2: I was just you know, so so yeah.
Speaker 5: And I think by way of how the VA has failed,
Speaker 5: I mean, I think it has not wanted to address
Speaker 5: the fact that it has a race issue. There was
Speaker 5: a survey of VIA employees about two or three years ago,
Speaker 5: and of them it something of words of seventy percent
Speaker 5: said that they dealt with racism or they saw discrimination
Speaker 5: on their in their everyday jobs. Right of the of
Speaker 5: the employees that were actually surveyed. What does that mean
Speaker 5: for the black vets that have to actually go and
Speaker 5: get get and get service there. And a story that
Speaker 5: actually happened recently this last year. There was an older
Speaker 5: black veteran that went to the VA was basically seeking
Speaker 5: help for PTSD and they'd forgotten about him.
Speaker 2: He was there for hours.
Speaker 5: He ended up killing himself inside the VA, right, And
Speaker 5: so these are just kind of added total conversations about
Speaker 5: just systemic failures because you know, our pain isn't seen
Speaker 5: as the same or what our experiences aren't as validated.
Speaker 5: There's not enough cultural competency within the VA, and I
Speaker 5: don't know there are efforts to try to change that,
Speaker 5: but there are actors, just like there are actors that
Speaker 5: are entrenched in within the Department of Defense that just
Speaker 5: don't see race as an issue or purposely just want
Speaker 5: to continue to have the disparities continue to ravage. And
Speaker 5: if we hadn't done the study with YM put pressure on,
Speaker 5: I don't know if they would have even said, hey,
Speaker 5: we should address the fact that there's a thirty percent
Speaker 5: disparity with PTSD.
Speaker 1: I don't know, Matthew, what role does the American public
Speaker 1: play and contributing positively into the lives of veterans, because
Speaker 1: because like we we know we are in America, right,
Speaker 1: you know, we celebrate the veteran and we love that veteran.
Speaker 1: And then you go to the football game, everybody give
Speaker 1: it up for the veteran. Look at that veteran over
Speaker 1: there sitting there, and join the game and we clap
Speaker 1: for that veteran. We pride ourselves on honoring folks who
Speaker 1: risk their lives on the battlefield. But throughout history, and
Speaker 1: we know what's going on in the present day, but
Speaker 1: throughout history, what has been the experience of black veterans
Speaker 1: returning home?
Speaker 4: The experience of Black World or Two veterans returning home
Speaker 4: was that they were openly disrespected in the communities they
Speaker 4: came back to. They were on the wrong side of
Speaker 4: the GI Bill policy. By and large, they were openly
Speaker 4: harassed by a lot of white communities. Their stories of
Speaker 4: black veterans as soon as they got back on ships
Speaker 4: being directed white veterans this way, Negro veterans that way,
Speaker 4: and oftentimes they didn't use the polite term there.
Speaker 3: There's hearing racial obtects as soon as they get off.
Speaker 4: As soon as they get off a boat, they're being
Speaker 4: directed to not march their troops through white towns. They
Speaker 4: have to take a circuit as path it only goes
Speaker 4: through black towns. And there's at least a dozen black
Speaker 4: Order Two veterans who were murdered some wires still wearing
Speaker 4: their military uniforms because too many white citizens thought that
Speaker 4: these black veterans were going to be leaders in civilrice
Speaker 4: moment after the war, and black veterans were.
Speaker 3: They were.
Speaker 4: They came back and they demanded equal rights, They demanded
Speaker 4: the kind of freedom inmocracy their for abroad. But the
Speaker 4: kind of treatment these black veterans received was horrific and
Speaker 4: it was not fitting out their service. I think, thinking
Speaker 4: of the present, what does it mean for the American
Speaker 4: public to actually support veterans and troops is to think
Speaker 4: about what it means to support individual veterans and troops
Speaker 4: that I think too often you find yourself at supporting event.
Speaker 4: Everyone will clap for the veterans when they stand up,
Speaker 4: which is great in theory. But then when push comes
Speaker 4: to shove and money's to being allocated to the VA,
Speaker 4: your money's to be allocated to support the actual lives
Speaker 4: of veterans, to make sure that they have the resources
Speaker 4: they need to re enter American side and to be
Speaker 4: able to thrive professionally. That's where we need the American
Speaker 4: public to stand up. It's not enough to say that
Speaker 4: one supports the troops or one supports veterans. At a
Speaker 4: supporting event, you're kind of generically supporting the category. Then
Speaker 4: what you need to do is support the actual living
Speaker 4: people in your communities who served this country.
Speaker 1: After the break, I want to talk solutions and Richard,
Speaker 1: I want to dig a little bit more into your
Speaker 1: program and what you were doing to help the veteran
Speaker 1: as my uncle calls it, veterans think that's how black
Speaker 1: people say, vet vetch vet trends. This is beyond the scenes.
Speaker 1: We'll be right back on. I want to end with
Speaker 1: a couple questions about what we can do. You know,
Speaker 1: with regards to solutions and Richard, you have spent a
Speaker 1: lot of time sitting and building out this project that
Speaker 1: you've talked about a couple You've already mentioned it a
Speaker 1: couple times, but let's really pull back the layers on it.
Speaker 1: You know, it's called the Black Veterans Project. With everything
Speaker 1: you've laid out today in terms of the systemic issues
Speaker 1: within it for enlisted officers and the issues that retired
Speaker 1: officers deal with, are you optimistic about seeing progress around
Speaker 1: the issues of racial equity within the military, because you
Speaker 1: know you'll start a project, I'm going to solve the problem,
Speaker 1: and then you look at the problem you'd be like,
Speaker 1: whoah shit.
Speaker 5: Yeah, absolutely, I mean I wouldn't be doing this if
Speaker 5: I didn't feel like we could have an impact.
Speaker 2: I think, I look at what we've done over the
Speaker 2: last four years.
Speaker 5: It really started with the idea that you know, when
Speaker 5: I was googling black vet, nothing really showed up except
Speaker 5: a few miscellaneous organizations, of whom we've begun to collaborate with.
Speaker 2: Some of them.
Speaker 5: A lot of older black vet Black Vets have been
Speaker 5: organizing forever. Right, there are black vet organizations as old
Speaker 5: as out of World War One.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 5: I got to go to an old American legion that's
Speaker 5: a historically black American legion, and they were founded by
Speaker 5: returning black gis who didn't have anywhere else to go,
Speaker 5: and they formed community and they ended up doing amazing things.
Speaker 5: But my generation is what understands the Internet, right, and
Speaker 5: so when I started the project, I realized that like
Speaker 5: their history just wasn't being told and there wasn't enough coverage.
Speaker 2: So I think, you know, we've been part and parcel
Speaker 2: to the proliferation of a lot.
Speaker 5: Of storytelling around, specifically with the press, like working with
Speaker 5: the press and edifying journalists and making sure that folks
Speaker 5: are talking about this in the digital sphere around like
Speaker 5: just historical contributions, but also like the inequities, just making
Speaker 5: sure that the inequities aren't lost. It's very easy to
Speaker 5: put up a photo of the Tuskegee Airmen and say, oh,
Speaker 5: that's enough, But then you're not talking about how some
Speaker 5: of those men were obstructed from the GI build and
Speaker 5: the compelling generational impact, right. So I just wanted to
Speaker 5: kind of force a more rounded conversation and then you
Speaker 5: know what we've been able to glean by way of
Speaker 5: data and then kind of connecting researchers and folks that
Speaker 5: are really interested in reparations for black vets, because.
Speaker 2: That's really at the heart of the work that we've
Speaker 2: been doing is that I.
Speaker 5: Believe and we believe that veterans are the best position
Speaker 5: to push forward. Black vets are the best position to
Speaker 5: push forward a conversation about reparations in this country, especially
Speaker 5: because we don't have to go all the way back
Speaker 5: to slavery. We can talk about something that was done
Speaker 5: in the last one hundred years, let alone the last
Speaker 5: fifty to sixty years that has been affecting black black veterans.
Speaker 5: But also when we talk about black vets, we're also
Speaker 5: talking about black families the black community, right, They're not
Speaker 5: mutually exclusive.
Speaker 1: So yeah, So then to that point, Matthew, can we
Speaker 1: can we legislated? Is there anything being done on a
Speaker 1: policy level to combat racism within the ranks of the military,
Speaker 1: because I always feel like the military, like you have
Speaker 1: the federal government. In my opinion, you have the federal
Speaker 1: government and then you had the military, and like, the
Speaker 1: military is always treated as this weird annexed fifty first state,
Speaker 1: if you will, that has their own jail, their own court,
Speaker 1: their own funding, their own little network of hospitals and everything.
Speaker 1: How can DC better legislate stuff, you know, even beyond reparations.
Speaker 1: Is that even happening right now?
Speaker 3: Yeah? Let me answered in two ways.
Speaker 4: So on the military side, absolutely, I mean, theoretically, the
Speaker 4: military is a taxpayer funded institution and it should be
Speaker 4: accountable to the kind of treatment that Americans who serve
Speaker 4: their country are receiving. I think the question of when
Speaker 4: the military observes racism happening, whether it's those explicit asks
Speaker 4: of racism or it's the kind of day to day
Speaker 4: perpetuation of racism that harms black trips and people of
Speaker 4: color in the military and prevents them from having long
Speaker 4: sustained beneficial careers. Those are things that the military can
Speaker 4: hold troops to account for. That's going to take work,
Speaker 4: it's going to take action, it's going to take leadership.
Speaker 4: But the military is nothing if it's not a structured organization.
Speaker 4: It's a hierarchical organization. So if military leaders say this
Speaker 4: is going to happen, and they hold their supportinents to account,
Speaker 4: that is something that can change if the American public
Speaker 4: demands it.
Speaker 3: The change and the other piece.
Speaker 4: Picking up what Richard was saying about policy legislation, there
Speaker 4: was a legislation that was introduced last year called the
Speaker 4: GI Bill Restoration Act that would go a long way
Speaker 4: towards addressing the wrong of the GI Bill and the
Speaker 4: racial discrimination that happened there. It was introduced on Veterans'
Speaker 4: Day twenty twenty one, just last year, by Seth Moulton
Speaker 4: and James Clayburn and the House representatives, and by Raphael Warnock.
Speaker 3: In the Senate.
Speaker 4: What that legislation would do is it would provide those
Speaker 4: Gibul benefits to the descendants of Black World or two
Speaker 4: veterans who had been denied those benefits, so would enabled
Speaker 4: them to be able to use it for home loans
Speaker 4: or for college tuition. That's a small piece of a
Speaker 4: much larger conversation about reparations. But reparations is about repairs
Speaker 4: both the financial aspect and trying to make right the
Speaker 4: kind of benefits that these black veterans should have received.
Speaker 4: But also it's about acknowledging that this was wrong. This
Speaker 4: was something that black veterans had earned through their service
Speaker 4: in World War Two that had been denied to them,
Speaker 4: and so just the possibility of passing legislation beyond the
Speaker 4: very important financial aspect would do justice to the service
Speaker 4: of these black veterans and help to repair that wrong.
Speaker 1: I want to end optimistically, what can we the regular
Speaker 1: people of the world do to properly honor and support
Speaker 1: veterans other than letting them board first on the airplane
Speaker 1: and giving them fifty five cent coffee at fast food establishments,
Speaker 1: because we all know that's what fixes all of these issues,
Speaker 1: being able to get on the plane first. What else
Speaker 1: can we do, Richard, I'll start with you.
Speaker 5: There are abundance of policies that have been pushed forward
Speaker 5: to try to address the issue of race in the military,
Speaker 5: But how can the American public I think one, it's
Speaker 5: edifying themselves on the necessity of ensuring that a piece
Speaker 5: of legislation like the Giblo Restoration Act can actually do
Speaker 5: some level of repair. They have intent to try to
Speaker 5: break that bill up, to try to pass components of
Speaker 5: it next year, specifically the housing provision in the one
Speaker 5: hundred and eighteenth Congress, which would give quite literally potentially
Speaker 5: millions of African Americans access to zero VA back home loans.
Speaker 5: But we already know that there is still a rampant
Speaker 5: discrimination with respect to black folks access to home loans.
Speaker 5: Right we need let alone home appraisals and all these
Speaker 5: other things. So what is the private sector doing also
Speaker 5: to just ensure that the landscape is set so that
Speaker 5: this reparations can potentially be instituted in a way that
Speaker 5: can actually have an impact. Because as it stands now,
Speaker 5: we might pass this bill by the grace of God,
Speaker 5: and the impact that it could have had is undermined
Speaker 5: by the lack of public awareness and also a lack
Speaker 5: of real due diligence with respect to how we actually
Speaker 5: get this bet to fit in the hands of the
Speaker 5: families that have been affected. Because it's also an invisible wound. Right,
Speaker 5: And I'll say this as the last part. It's like
Speaker 5: one in engaging with a lot of journals specifically around
Speaker 5: World War Two in the harms of the and access
Speaker 5: to the GI Bill, is that a lot of families
Speaker 5: don't even know that this happened to them, right, or
Speaker 5: I can't even fully articulate it. And you have a
Speaker 5: whole generation that very close to not being with us anymore. Right,
Speaker 5: But their families certainly bear the scars economically, at least
Speaker 5: of in access to the GI Bill. So I think
Speaker 5: the biggest thing that the American public can do is
Speaker 5: educate themselves, engage with the history by half American read
Speaker 5: read a book.
Speaker 2: Honestly, I think that.
Speaker 5: That is like the best way so that we're not
Speaker 5: engaging ignorant based discourse.
Speaker 4: Matthew, how do we support I'm a historian, so I'll
Speaker 4: say the same thing I say to my students that
Speaker 4: the stories we tell about the past matter. And so
Speaker 4: I think a first starting point is really reckoning, honestly
Speaker 4: with the history of our country, particularly when it comes
Speaker 4: to military that black Americans people of color have served
Speaker 4: this country.
Speaker 3: Throughout our nation's history.
Speaker 4: They've been deeply, deeply patriotic, but that service hasn't always
Speaker 4: been repaid, and so I think a starting point is
Speaker 4: recognizing that veterans have been treated unequally throughout American history,
Speaker 4: and particularly with the story about World War Two. I
Speaker 4: think in the present, I think it's important to talk
Speaker 4: about veterans as actual living people. I think we're at
Speaker 4: a point right now in our country where the military
Speaker 4: is drawn from about one percent of the entire yeo's population.
Speaker 4: So you have the one percent who serves in the
Speaker 4: ninety nine percent of everyone else, and we've fallen into
Speaker 4: this trap where veterans are treated as heroes as a
Speaker 4: sort of generic category, but then too often ignored as individuals,
Speaker 4: particularly for black veterans and veterans of color. That is
Speaker 4: a disservice to veterans and also to the larger American public.
Speaker 4: I think as citizens who are not in the military
Speaker 4: are not veterans, we have to treat veterans as sort
Speaker 4: of actual living and breathing people who deserve the benefits
Speaker 4: that they earned and deserve to be welcome back into
Speaker 4: American communities and given all the support they need to
Speaker 4: find careers professional pathways that do justice to the important
Speaker 4: work they did within the military.
Speaker 1: Well, I can't thank you all enough for this wonderful,
Speaker 1: wonderful conversation. I appreciate you all for going beyond the
Speaker 1: scenes with me today. That's all the time we have.
Speaker 1: Thank you to our guests Richard and Matthew, and be
Speaker 1: sure to check out Matthew's new book, Half American, the
Speaker 1: epic story of African Americans fighting World War Two at
Speaker 1: home and abroad. Thank you both, Thanks Lit, Thank you
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