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Iraq, New Orleans, and the Twin Cities: The Struggle against War and Racism Today
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by Frieda Gardner, W A M M
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I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values.
—Martin Luther King, Jr |
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In April, 1967, Martin Luther King gave a speech to the group Clergy and Laity Concerned about the war in Vietnam. Its title was “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence.” In this speech, risking censure from colleagues in both the civil rights and the antiwar movements who wanted to keep issues safely separate, King went “beyond” Vietnam by taking a deep look at the systems underlying that war. He said: “I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.”
On January 14th WAMM and the Iraq Peace Action Coalition sponsored a Martin Luther King Day program titled “Iraq, New Orleans, and the Twin Cities: The Struggle against War and Racism Today.” In analyzing the current war in Iraq, four insightful panelists looked at the disheartening evidence of how little has changed, how much has indeed gotten worse since Vietnam, but they also explored the growing strength of our resistance.
Rose Brewer, professor of African American and African Studies at the University of Minnesota and member of the Black Radical Congress, who has written extensively about the interrelations between race, class, and gender, pointed to King’s recognition of a “poverty draft,” which because of America’s racism, always means that people of color make up a bigger percentage of the armed forces than their population numbers would indicate. (African Americans occupy one out of every five jobs in our armed forces.) She characterized King’s peace advocacy as “radical,” because he connected America’s enthusiasm for bombing “brown” Vietnamese citizens in the name of democracy to its dismantling of domestic social safety nets when the wars of empire grow too expensive. He saw that our “enemies” abroad and our objects of racism and social injustice at home had much in common, noting, “We were taking black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them thousands of miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem.”
Alice O. Lynch, too, focused on connections between foreign and domestic realities, picturing a ghetto mother hiding her children from gunfire under their beds, much as Iraqi mothers hide their children from our terrifying raids on their neighborhoods. Lynch serves on the board of Women’s Action for New Directions (WAND) and is also executive director of Black, Indian, Hispanic, and Asian Women in Action (BIHA). BIHA focuses on programs dealing with the many forms of violence attacking the families of women of color, while WAND works against the insanely huge military budgets which drain resources away from the most vulnerable people in our country.
For Lynch, as for all the speakers on the panel, “Katrina” serves as a codeword for the Bush administration’s massive failure of compassion, competency, and social imagination. Whether “Katrina” points to a plan to ignore the poor of New Orleans or is just another screw-up by a war-addled bureaucracy is less important than noting the outcome in either case. What Alice Lynch notices are coffins on one side and shredded education plans on the other. She recalls her family’s anxious watch over her nephew in Iraq, as daily they read his e-mails saying he would come home first one day, then a week, then a month later. On the other side of social misery, loss, and fear, both here and in Iraq, are the ever-growing costs of the war in actual dollars, which could be spent for social good. After explaining in detail the ongoing complexities of the current military budget, Lynch urged everyone to get out and support House Joint Resolution Bill 55, the Homeward Bound Act, which would require Bush to come up with a plan for withdrawing our troops from Iraq. (H.J. RES. 55, initiated last spring, is still making its way through the deeply divided Congress.)
Keith Ellison, Minnesota State DFL Rep. 58B, and a strong opponent of environmental racism both state- and worldwide, was represented on the panel by his articulate and well-informed son Isaiah, who both read his father’s prepared speech and responded to audience questions. Ellison read out a vivid sentence from King’s “Beyond Vietnam” speech that echoed our current situation: “Then came the buildup in Vietnam, and I watched this (war on) poverty program broken and eviscerated, as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war, and I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube.” Given the thirteen percent rise in poverty during the Bush administration, the “money drain toward the elite” and to Bush “cronies,” Ellison recommends immediate withdrawal of our troops from Iraq and reallocation of war resources to civilian needs. He also drew attention to Minnesota’s Governor Pawlenty’s cuts to welfare, schools, housing, and community development.
For Trishalla Bell, an organizer with the Twin Cities’ Welfare Rights Committee, Katrina was less code than the actual hurricane that devastated New Orleans, which she’d recently visited. Bell focused on the poor in both America and Iraq, saying that in both places it looks as if “the rich are the ones being liberated.” She reminded us that Halliburton has lucrative contracts both in Iraq and Louisiana. Having played tapes of people dealing with FEMA runarounds in both New Orleans and Houston, Bell contrasted the kind of direct, empowering help offered by the WRC. She also joined Rose Brewer in warning against one of the worst features of what King called the “cruel manipulation of the poor”; that is, the pitting of one deprived and neglected group against another (poor blacks against poor whites against poor Hispanics; the “deserving” against the “undeserving” poor or middle class).
For all its attention to the violence, pain, and deprivation of our time, each panelist pointed to the important work being done by those who struggle against militarism and racism. Rose Brewer noted that despite poverty and unemployment, there still has been a significant recruitment drop in the black community. People see the racism of the war, and the profiling in their own and in immigrant communities. They see the draining away of resources. And, following King’s courageous lead, they often find ways to say, emphatically, “No!” to both war and empire. |
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Anti-Racism Resources
WAND online
BIHA online
BRC online
H.J.Res. 55 Homeward Bound Act online
The Co$t of War
Billions Stolen From Iraq Reported by CBS
Some $8.8 billion dispersed for reconstruction efforts in Iraq is unaccounted for, says the U.S. official in charge of tracing it. (more click here)
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© 2006 Women Against Military Madness. All rights reserved.
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Complete March 2006 Index - click here
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