Posted on 04/07/2003 6:20:46 AM PDT by jordan8
April 7 2003
The war in Iraq is illuminating a racial divide in America, a profound rift in thinking between blacks and whites. Different histories and different experiences are bringing many people to different conclusions.
Among black Americans, just 29 per cent support the war, while 78 per cent of white Americans do, according to a March 28 Gallup poll.
Many blacks see wrongs in the conflict that white Americans often cannot discern, African American scholars and analysts say.
For one thing, many black people say their history makes them especially sensitive to the spectacle of a dominant entity asserting its will over a weaker minority.
Then, too, the US policy of pre-emption - attacking Iraq without provocation - smacks of a kind of harassment with which many blacks say they are all too familiar.
Finally, there is US President George Bush himself, excoriated by many blacks as the victor in a contested election in which black votes reportedly went uncounted; as the former Texas governor who executed many black convicts; as an allegedly insensitive leader who used Martin Luther King's birthday as the time to express his opposition to affirmative action - an issue coincidentally being taken up by the US Supreme Court as fighting rages in Iraq.
"If anything," says University of Pennsylvania sociologist Elijah Anderson, "Bush puts forth an agenda seen by black people as antagonistic. That accounts for a huge amount of alienation in the black community. That makes so many blacks turned off by this war. These days, blacks have an especially critical eye on Washington."
Many blacks find themselves in a quandary - opposing a war in which a disproportionate number of those in the military are black. Though they are 12 per cent of the general population, blacks make up 21 per cent of the US military.
This has created a conflict for black families who want to support dear ones in the killing zone but cannot condone the war.
Black America is hardly a monolith, and those blacks who do support the war have no problem standing up for their beliefs in the rightness of the mission.
"I really do believe Saddam Hussein is a dangerous man," said Tracy Price-Thompson, 39, a retired Army lieutenant who lives in Fort Dix, New Jersey, with her army husband. She is the author of Black Coffee, a novel about blacks in the Army.
"I've heard black people say, 'This is not our war.' If you look at this as an American, then this is your war."
For some blacks, there's an additional complication in all this - what National Public Radio's Tavis Smiley calls the "tricky conversation" regarding Secretary of State Colin Powell and national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, blacks who are among the Bush administration's most visible players in the war.
The polls demonstrate that, among black Americans, much anti-war sentiment is directed toward the President - and that the enmity is widely held.
"Bush is more of an immediate threat to me," says Quintel Harcum, a 21-year-old philosophy student at Lincoln University, one of America's oldest black universities, tucked into southern Chester County, Pennsylvania. "He's against affirmative action."
It is not lost on many blacks that the war is raging at the precise moment the US Supreme Court is contemplating the future of affirmative action.
"Nobody minds us fighting and dying," says William Spriggs, executive director of the National Urban League Institute for Opportunity and Equality in Washington. "But everyone is up in arms about our going to college." He was referring to those opposed to affirmative action at the University of Michigan, whose entrance policy is part of the Supreme Court case.
At a more basic level, many blacks still question the legitimacy of Mr Bush's presidency. Citing the reported disenfranchisement of numerous black voters in Florida during the 2000 election, Mr Anderson said the disputed vote "still sticks in the throat. It's caused huge African-American alienation toward Bush".
Beyond Mr Bush, the sight of American treasure being expended to fund a war rankles with people who see where the money could be better spent.
"We have war going on in our neighbourhoods," says Stephane Coney, 39, of Camden, Pennsylvania, founder of the National Stop the Violence Alliance, a grass-roots anti-violence group. "We have war going on in our schools."
Brandon Bigelow, a 20-year-old Lincoln University student, agrees. "What I'm against is the US saying it's taking care of all these countries when there are things to be fixed at home."
The US decision to attack Iraq pre-emptively, without proof that Saddam possesses weapons of mass destruction, reminds some black people of hostile police behaviour.
"It rings of the experience of cops' saying, 'I thought I saw a gun' to justify the shooting of an unarmed black suspect," says Mr Spriggs.
"You gotta give us more evidence than, 'I thought I saw a gun'."
In other words, white Americans are not sensitive enough in a "politically correct" way. We aren't open-minded enough. We aren't tolerant enough. What a laugh!
America is filled with people of much more varied backgrounds than most nations. Generally speaking, people of all different backgrounds are given an equal shot here.
Unlike some folks in other countries, we haven't declared war on particular groups because we don't like the books they publish, the clothes they wear, the entertainments they enjoy, or the religion they profess.
We generally believe in "live, and let live," and I think we are allowed to defend our lives when faced with those who believe in slaughtering people because of their beliefs or because of the way they dress or behave in daily life.
Good catch.
To suggest a racial divide over the war is intellectually dishonest, IMO.
What's the percentage of Dems that are anti-war (read: anti-Dubya)?
Different conclusions? Like in the jury's decision in the OJ trial?
Stalin and the DNC: tell a big enough lie often enough and it becomes th truth.
Though they are 12 per cent of the general population, blacks make up 21 per cent of the US military.
Another lie; it's more like 14%; and most of them are folks I'd be proud to call neighbor.
I have to keep reminding myself and my family about General Brooks and Walter Williams and the black Christians we know. We have to ignore the vast statistics, like the prison article on the FR today, and the black vote and our neighborhood which tend to make us feel like bigots.
I should think the fact that iraq bankrolled both WTC attacks ('93 & 9/11) is more than enough "provocation"!
Liberals, by their very nature, are apparently unable to accept the fact that enemies can and do exist - appeasement, therefore, is the only thing they understand. The whole concept of "pre-emptive action" would naturally be a source of consternation and puzzlement to a liberal, and it is the liberal press which is promulgating all this crap about this group or that being disenfranchised and believing this way or that.
Thanks for the post - yet another glimpse into the cockeyed world of skewed liberal thought! As if liberals ever did anything thing for ANY minority group, other than put their lying liberal foot on minority's necks to keep them under liberal control, and to promulgate devisive multiculturalism in America!
I'm wondering where that talking point is coming from - black radio stations? And where did they get it?
International Law is like gay marriage. It's totally phoney and usually disregarded on a whim.
I think he realizes that with his degree in African Culture and Civil Rights History, the only way he will get a real job is if some company is forced to hire him. That is the whole crux - people like this guy are convinced that the only way ahead for them is for people to be forced to accept them, not to accept them on their merits.
But there's a historic opportunity for racial reconciliation right now. It can never happen under a Democrat president. The Democrats have everything to lose, politically, if blacks and whites start seeing eye to eye. Therefore, nearly all of their policies are aimed at dividing the races and disenfranchising blacks.
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