This Is NOT Sparta!

11 Wednesday Nov 2015

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, culture, Eclectic, Movies, Patriotism, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Sports

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Black Americans, Black Migration, Blind Patriotism, Civil Rights Movement, Civilians, Erasure, Freedom, History Lessons, Honoring, Hyper-Patriotism, Invisibility, Jim Crow, Meaning, Native Americans, Patriotism for Profit, Sacrifice, Service, Slavery, Veterans Day

“If you live in a free country, thank a veteran” poster slogan, November 10, 2015. (http://facebook.com).

Just like with Memorial Day and with Independence Day, I often find myself conflicted about Veterans Day. Not because I think individual members of the military deserve praise or scorn. As usual, the vast majority of Americans think too simplistically about their country, its people, its intentions and history, even its holidays. Too many of us go along to get along. It’s as if we expect the contradictions and tensions that make up our times and days like today to simply melt away in some high-pitched display of blind patriotism. I have not — and likely will never be — that American, pumped up with pride and affection, shouting slogans as gospel truth, thanking every member of the military for every single breath of American air that I breathe. And that is because the narrative for days like today has never worked for me.

In some respects, the blind march of Veterans Day is with Americans every single day. The media covers the military and individual military members as if all of them have spent weeks on the front lines, as if all of them are patriots above reproach. Almost all of us have known someone who’s served, and we know that service for most was never as simple as wrapping the American flag around themselves in defense of American freedoms halfway around the world (or at a base a few miles from home). In recent months, we’ve learned that much of the constant drumbeat of military-fueled patriotism the military itself has bought and paid for, at NFL and college football and baseball games. Reinforcing one of America’s main values — profit.

Army National Guardsmen about to run on field with American flags with the New England Patriots, Super Bowl XLIX, University of Phoenix Stadium, Glendale, AZ, February 1, 2015. (http://latimes.com; Getty Images).

Today is Veterans Day, created seventy-seven years ago in the aftermath of the Great War, the “War to End All Wars,” World War I. It was a terrible war, after all. Ten million soldiers and sailors on all sides died, twenty million found themselves ripped and torn apart, and eight million civilians died. But not for or in the US, where 120,000 soldiers and sailors died, a few hundred thousand were wounded, and few hundred civilians died. The US didn’t enter the war until April 1917, nearly three years into the raging Eurasian conflict. American weapons manufacturers and merchants profited greatly from the war even before the US declared war on Germany, selling arms and food to both sides.

War is never simple. Neither should be what we think of those who served or are serving. Veterans Day is about respecting those who have served or are serving. Like my youngest brother Eri, or my Uncle Felton, or my sister-in-law or my late uncle-in-laws. Thanking or respecting them, though, shouldn’t be tied directly to the idea that I “live in a free country.” I don’t believe that the US is a free country, not for me and for millions of others like me. Nor do I believe that the US military has played a role in preserving my individual freedoms and liberties historically. I am a Black man living in a society built in part on systemic racism, often maintained or reinforced by the US military. Except for some elements of the Union Army during the Civil War, the US military has played a very small role in making sure that I or anyone who looks like me — male, female or transgender — lives in a free country.

Not to mention, the US hasn’t been invaded in over 200 years (I don’t want to hear about Pancho Villa — that wasn’t an invasion). Since when does fighting North Koreans, the Viet Cong, or even Nazis equate to me and others and our “freedoms?” Seriously, every time someone says this, it’s as if you’re attempting to erase long civilian fights for civil rights, for the most basic of freedoms that the US purports to grant to every citizen. Folks who say that we should be grateful to the military for living in a free country completely make invisible Native Americans. The US military was what guaranteed their near annihilation, deculturalization and unyielding poverty, especially from 1865 on.

“This is madness!” with actor Peter Mensah, screen shot from 300 (2007), November 11, 2015. (http://youtube.com).

Yes, some of you will note that I can write my post without fear of retribution from the government. Then I will say in response, “How does serving overseas guarantee my rights?” It doesn’t. A lot went into putting me in a better position in my life. Black migration, the Civil Rights Movement (flaws and all), the sacrifices of Black and White civilian leadership (including their deaths). I am one generation removed from sharecropping and tenant farming in Georgia and Arkansas, one generation removed from the last years of the Jim Crow era. But somehow, the US military is responsible for me living “in a free country.” Sorry, but that’s a narrative I cannot get behind.

So, we should all thank individual veterans for their service. We should honor the dead and the broken among them. For whether they came to serve out of a deep sense of patriotism, because of the draft (prior to 1973), because there weren’t any jobs in their communities, or because they wanted a chance at today’s version of the GI bill, some of them have paid dearly in their service. But since we do not live in a military junta or in a totalitarian society, I dare say that I don’t have to go along with the narrative that without the military, I would be a slave. History contradicts every aspect of this false narrative.

This isn’t Sparta (Sparta wasn’t even Sparta). Nor should the US ever be Sparta.

Eugene Robinson Disses Black Generation X

08 Wednesday Jun 2011

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Politics, Pop Culture, race

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Abandoned, Abandoned Communities, African Americans, African Immigrants, Black Americans, Black Baby Boomers, Black Gen Xers, Caribbean Immigrants, Disintegration, Emergent, Eugene Robinson, Generational Divide, Intrarace Relations, Invisibility, Mainstream, Mlllennial Generation Blacks, Model Minority, MSNBC, Post-Civil Rights Generation, Pulitzer Prize, Race, Racism, Thomas Sowell, Transcendent, Washington Post

Disintegration Book Cover, June 8, 2011. Donald Earl Collins. Note the beat-up look of the cover, thanks to my wife, who had it for more than five months before I read it last week.

I finally got around to reading Eugene Robinson’s Disintegration: The Splintering of Black America this week. Despite my doubts, I hoped that the famed Washington Post columnist, MSNBC rock star and Pulitzer Prize winner would say something profound, or at the least, provocative. Not only did I not learn anything new in the three and half hours it took for me to read Disintegration. I learned that Robinson, like so many accomplished Blacks of his generation, doesn’t see Black Generation Xers when talking about the state of African America. The generational divide, perhaps the greatest example of disintegration that Robinson should’ve discussed, he rendered invisible throughout his book.

I know I’m late by Black literati standards in taking so long to sit down and read this book. After all, I bought the book this past Christmas as my personal birthday present. I had a feeling, though, that somehow, this book really wasn’t for me, a forty-one year-old Black Gen Xer who’s spent about half of my life thinking about this and other related issues. To slightly misquote Arnold Schwarzenegger from Total Recall, “Welcome to the party, Robinson!”

Over and over again in Disintegration, Robinson referred to the positions of Black Baby Boomers in a splintered Black America, as well as to the hopes, fears and aspirations of millennial generation African Americans (particularly on issues like the decline of interracial prejudice and educational attainment). I guess because Robinson mostly relied on his personal journey as a guide to understanding the history of African America’s disintegration — including using his sons as a time line template — it meant that folks born between ’65 and ’85 didn’t really count.

Unless, of course, they were part of the Abandoned class, the ones who found themselves increasingly poor and isolated after ’68 in communities like Shaw and U Street in DC. Or, in my case, on the South Side and other pockets of Mount Vernon, New York by the late 70s and ’80s. Then Robinson’s sympathetic voice kicked in, one which acknowledged all of the ills that one in four Blacks face every day. Still, Black Gen Xers are only in the Abandoned in Robinson’s mind and words by proxy.

There are far more obvious errors of omission in Robinson’s somewhat thought-provoking, 237-page column than leaving out an entire generation of post-Civil Rights era Black folk. Like Robinson stumbling his way into Thomas Sowell’s “model minority” argument like a punch-drunk boxer in the final round of a fight. Or, really, like a writer running out of steam at the end of a manuscript.

Robinson’s fifteen-page chapter “The Emergence (Part 1): Coming To America” is all about a new immigration wave of Blacks from sub-Saharan Africa and the Caribbean who are more highly educated than any other immigrant group arriving these days (and are better educated than most Americans, for that matter). Yes this is true in the aggregate. But besides a few examples that serve to exaggerate more than enlighten, Robinson’s analysis sounds like Sowell’s arguments from ’72. Only without the conservative policy implications and with a generous lack of sophistication in understanding the diversity within these immigrant groups.

There’s also the use of these troubling terms of Transcendent and Mainstream, both of which evoke a ’70s-style thinking about African Americans who’ve “made it.” How about “New Black Elite” and “Successful Yet Struggling Black Middle,” both of which are more accurate descriptors? I understand that Robinson’s purpose with Disintegration was to poke and prod readers, albeit in a light way. Still, the book seems written for what he would describe as aspiring Transcendents who are far too busy climbing social ladders to think about cultural and community disintegration post-1968, rather than those of us who do.

Which brings me back to Robinson’s Black Gen X blind spot. How is it possible that someone with the panache and diligence of Robinson could forget about the 26-46 year-old demographic in Disintegration? The reasons are as plain as the positions of prestige that Transcendent African American Baby Boomers occupy and cling to like a man with a fingernail death grip on a precipice. (And, despite Robinson’s protestations to the contrary, by his own definition, he and his family are Transcendent. Who else gets to hang out with Oprah and Vernon Jordan or do interviews with President Obama without being Transcendent?)

Me and my generation of Blacks had been written off by Robinson’s gangs of elites and wannabe elites by the time I was a college freshman at the University of Pittsburgh in ’87. Our ideas about the disintegration of Black America and what that has meant over the past forty years are undoubtedly fresher. Yet we as a group aren’t asked about our ideas. Apparently when Black America disintegrated, we fell into a black hole. At least in Mr. Robinson’s neighborhood.