We must confront the challenges Black vets face beyond the battlefield
A post shared by Richard Brookshire (@richbrookshire)On Veterans Day, it’s difficult not to contemplate the many ways America’s ceaseless wars have ravaged Black folk.
In a nation whose economic foundation is built on exploiting its poor to wage war, the benefits of military service have often been made conditional for Black America.
Whether as a means to escape slavery, thwart Jim Crow, avoid mass incarceration, or flee poverty, our military-industrial complex has relied on our unwavering self-determination to lift ourselves out of our material condition by any means necessary.For generations, recruiting stations have siphoned untold numbers of Black youth into the mechanics of empire and war, only to spit them back out with little to no apparatus of support to catch them.
I think of their stories when I read about suicide rates, veteran homelessness, incarceration, and aging Black veterans living in poverty.Nothing tells this story quite like the work of the Black Veterans Project, the organization I’ve been privileged to lead over the last six years.A post shared by Richard Brookshire (@richbrookshire)Our efforts exposed a systemic pattern of racial discrimination by the Department of Veterans Affairs in administering veterans’ benefits, dating back to the GI Bill in the 1940s.
