COUNTERING MILITARY RECRUITMENT
Articles: Military Recruiting: Youth of Color
Because Mama Said So?
Glen Ford, TomPaine.com
July 06, 2007
Glen Ford is the executive editor of Black Agenda Report.The U.S. military may have thought it was a fluke when Black
recruitment started declining about the time the Iraq war began. Now
the multi-year figures are in, and the picture is clear: African
Americans are staying away from the military in droves. Since the war
in Afghanistan began, Black recruitment has fallen by more than a
third. The decline is even more dramatic when the National Guard and
Reserves are factored in. The Army has been most affected by the mass
Black stay-away, with the Black proportion of recruits cut almost in
half since the year 2000. But the phenomenon is felt strongly in all
the services.
The Pentagon points to several reasons for the implosion of Black
recruitment. More young African Americans are finding good jobs, the
top military brass say, citing what they claim is a strong economy.
But the data on Black youth employment do not support that theory and
remember, the decline in Black recruitment became first apparent in
the early 2000's, when the nation was in the grip of an extremely
harsh recession. Job prospects were terrible, but for more and more
young Blacks, service in the military under a war-happy George Bush
was not an option. Remember, also, that during the Clinton
presidency, when employment for young Blacks was far better than
under Bush, Black recruitment in the military remained high. The
Pentagon's economic theory for Black abstention from military service
doesn't stand up to the facts.
The second factor cited by the military is that family members and
Black political leaders are influencing young people to turn the
recruiters down. This makes a lot more sense, but then the Pentagon
throws nonsense into the equation, saying Black households more often
have women in charge, and women are more anti-war than men. This is a
clever way of transforming what is a political issue into a gender
issue. The fact is, the vast majority of Black men and women have
opposed Bush's Iraq war from the very beginning. That not
female-headed households, not youth job prospects is what separates
the Black community from all others, and logically accounts for the
dramatic decline in Black recruitment.
"Hispanics have been much less opposed to the Iraq war than Blacks."
The precipitous fall in African American volunteers is partially made
up for by sharp increases in Latino recruitment. Does that mean that
Latinos don't listen to their mothers? Of course not. Latinos are
over-represented, especially in combat units, because large numbers
of them see the military as a route to citizenship. But most
importantly, Hispanics have been much less opposed to the Iraq war
than Blacks. In fact, Hispanic opinion data on the war much more
resembles white opinion.
Bush's Army is now so hard up for soldiers, it has increased the age
of enlistment from 35 to 42 an indication of how waging imperial wars
is creating deep societal crisis.
Barack Obama far from opposing imperial war-making wants to add
nearly 100,000 more troops to the mix. Let's see what Black mothers
have to say about that.
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