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At a recent demonstration, American Indian Movement leader Vernon Bellecourt eloquently reminded us that the first wars of the American empire were against Native Americans. In the 1830s, thousands of Native Americans in southeastern U.S. were forced to leave their homes and walk the Trail of Tears to reservations in Oklahoma. In the 1880s, U.S. troops engaged in a series of devastating battles that broke treaties and trampled on Native sovereignty. Since then, the struggles for civil, economic, and land rights for Native Americans have stemmed from these earlier wars of conquest, leading activists like Bellecourt to found the American Indian Movement just over 30 years ago.
During the U.S. War with Mexico (1846-1848), young Irish men fresh off the boat—refugees from the potato famine—were the first to be drafted. Discovering that the United States considered them second-class citizens, many Irish soldiers switched sides and joined the Mexican army. In the aftermath of the war, Irish citizens eventually rose in status (in other words, the Irish became “white”).
Meanwhile, Mexico lost half its territory to the United States and 100,000 Mexicans became a new group of second-class citizens, gradually losing their landholdings in what is today the Southwest. The struggle for Mexican American civil rights began with this early war of conquest.
In 1898, the U.S. usurped Cuba’s three-year-old war for independence from Spain, winning its first overseas territory: the former Spanish colonies of Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Philippines. U.S. occupiers claimed it was the “white man’s burden” to civilize those of inferior blood. Filipinos believed they had the right to self-determination and fought a seventeen-year guerilla war. Hundreds of African American soldiers sent to put down the rebellion declined the white man’s burden and went AWOL to join the Filipino forces.
In 1917, Puerto Ricans became U.S. citizens just in time to serve in the U.S. Army in World War I. Ever since, Puerto Ricans have fought the use of Puerto Rican people and land to plan and carry out wars of conquest.
Those who opposed World War I were few in number. African American leaders W.E.B. Du Bois, Addie Hunton, and James Weldon Johnson supported it, like many social justice activists at the time, believing that it would not only be “the war to end all wars,” but that it would lead to greater democracy for oppressed people abroad and at home. Their opinion changed shortly after the war ended. They saw that words about fighting for “self-determination of small nations” were just words, and that lynching and Jim Crow discrimination at home only grew in the aftermath of the war.
In the early 1920s, Hunton founded the “International Council of Women of Darker Races” which took on U.S. imperialism, especially in Haiti (the U.S. occupied Haiti beginning in 1915). Du Bois and Johnson fought for Haitian independence, and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) made freedom for Haiti one of its national priorities in the mid-1920s. Du Bois began linking U.S. policy in the Caribbean and China and advocating Pan-Asian/Pan-African solidarity.
Participation in World War II was sold to low-income men as an avenue toward upward mobility. The GI Bill did open doors to better jobs and college education for a generation of working-class men. Yet the veterans’ benefits were not distributed evenly. Discrimination based on race led African Americans to initiate the “Double V” campaign—victory against racism in Germany and at home. Mexican American vets started the “GI Forum,” which fought discrimination in housing, education, and jobs, as well as veterans’ benefits.
During World War II, Japanese Americans were interned in camps. Survivors of these camps have been speaking out against government and vigilante discrimination against Arab Americans since September 11, 2001.
In the late 1940s and 1950s, the United States sought to exert its influence over newly independent African nations. U.S. diplomats discovered that discrimination against African Americans was a stumbling block to negotiations. The Democratic Party’s much-ballyhooed civil rights platform of 1948, for which Minnesota’s Hubert Humphrey is given far too much credit, was, in large part, a response to concerted pressure coming from a united Pan-African community.
Opposition to the Vietnam War is usually depicted as a movement of white, middle-class youth, ignoring the ways in which the civil rights and anti-war movements were linked. Martin Luther King’s famous speech at Riverside Church is one small manifestation of that link. The Chicano moratorium against the war in August of 1969, in which 25,000 to 30,000 Mexican Americans marched and rallied is more indicative of mass non-white sentiment. Newsreels of this event show a sea of brown faces of all ages demanding an end to the war.
Today polls show much greater opposition to the war in Iraq among Puerto Ricans and African Americans than among whites. The NAACP is again taking a stand against an imperial foreign policy.
Meanwhile, 44 Arab Americans have been arrested without charge in the last month. Palestinian American Maher Hawash, a computer programmer and Oregon native, has been held in jail in federal prison since March 20, 2003, without being charged of a crime. Arab Americans are discovering what Irish immigrants learned 150 years ago: Whiteness is a social construct that can be reconstructed to include and exclude groups at will. Even French Americans are losing their “whiteness.”
A recent New York Times article, “Is This Really an All Volunteer Army?”(April 6, 2003), discusses a military dilemma: To get enough recruits, there must be a large enough population of young people who are not college-bound. African Americans, who currently make up twenty percent of the army and twelve percent of the population, are going to college in greater numbers. The army is now looking to Hispanics whose “increases in college attendance have not kept up with blacks and non-Hispanic whites.” The recruitment plan for Latinos includes a promise of citizenship to immigrants who die in combat.
I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but as we in the Chicano studies department at the University of Minnesota struggle to keep the college doors open for Latino students I cannot help but wonder if those trying to close the door on us are doing so for reasons more complicated than “budget cuts.”
The past history of civil wrongs and militarism, of civil rights and anti-war movements is complicated. Despite this complexity, as we struggle to come to grips with past and current connections, we can start with a simple question: Who will profit and who will die?
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