You're listening to Comedy Central. Hey, it's Roy. Quick note about today's episode of Beyond the Scenes. The subject of suicide and suicide attempts are discussed briefly, So if you want a tiptoe away from this episode, you can, and if you want to stay, let's get started. Hey, welcome to Beyond the Scenes, the podcast that goes a little deeper into segments and topics that originally aired on The
Daily Show. But here's what this podcast like. This podcast is like when you were a kid and the bell rang for recess And now you're in the courtyard drinking your juice box and you're playing four square with your friend Aaron, who you're convinced is gonna be your most goodest best friend for the rest of your life. Then he moved away and he never told you goodbye. Still think about you, man, if you're out there, just there's
no love. I'm sorry. What were we talking about? Yeah, I'm Roy Wood Jr. And in honor of Veterans Day, we're talking about a CPE time segment that honored the contributions of the black soldier rode the clip in World War One. The three hundred and sixty ninth Infantry Regiment fought so fiercely that the Germans called them the Harlem hell Fighters. And when a German says you know how
to whoop ass, that means something. The Great War also provided many black fighters with their first chance to travel abroad, and once in France, our brothers in arms found something they had never seen before, respectful white people. It was so enjoyable in Europe that a lot of black soldiers didn't come back, which I understand. I went to Belgium for two days, ended up staying the whole summer with Helga and she knew how to iron that Belgian waffle.
Oh my waffles. I was there for three months, and then my wife found out. I'm sorry, baby, Please please let me go home. Today I'm joined by the co founder of the Black Veterans Project and former infantry, combat medic and US Army veteran Richard Brookshire. Richard, how you doing.
I'm doing good. I really have it to be here. Excited.
Well, good to have you here. I'll tell you my Veterans Day story about the parade in high school where I stepped in a horse turret. But first let's welcome my second guests. They're a professor of history at Dartmouth College and author of the new book Half American, The epic story of African Americans fighting World War Two at home and abroad. Matthew F. Delmont, Matthew, thank you for joining us.
Thanks for having me.
It's good to be here, right, Oh well, a pleasure to have you all. And let's get into this discussion. You know, the contributions of veterans, I think are often minimized and remixed in our society, and done so even more for black veterans. Matthew, I like to start with you.
Your book is titled half American. Talk to us a little bit about how you settled on the title of that book and what the experience was like for black service members in the military during that time, where you know, the racism and segregation was just as entrenched within our armed forces as it was in just general American society.
So the title of the book, calf American comes from a letter that a man named James Thompson wrote in December nineteen forty one, shortly after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Thompson writes a letter to the Pittsburgh Courier, which was the largest and most influential black newspaper at the time. What Thompson asks is, should I sacrifice my life to live half American? Is the America I know worth defending?
What he's saying is he is a Black American. You think about what it means for him and other Black Americans to get drafted into a military that is entirely racially segrogated.
The Army is serogated.
It only particularly allows Black Americans to serve in supply and logistical roles, by and large, are not allowed to participate in combat. In the Navy, black Americans are all allowed to volunteer and be drafted into the messment branch, where they essentially will wait on and serve white officers, and at the start of the war, black Americans aren't
all out in the Marine Corps at all. This is an affront to the patriotism and service of Black Americans that they want to be able to do everything they can to help protect their country, to serve the United States at this time of war, but the military doesn't do what they can to acknowledge their service and to take advantage of the skills that Black Americans can bring to the military.
Effort.
Once those black troops get drafted into the military, what they find is that conditions on those bases are just as bad, if not worse, than they aren't surrounding towns and cities in the country. Their stories abound of black troops being sent to these army camps in the South, and they're fearing for their lives. They get attacked by townspeople, they get verbally abused and physically harassed by white officers.
They're called racial epithets every day. Things get so bad that they're actually anxious and excited about the prospect of being able to deploy to battlefronts in Europe with the Pacific because they think it's going to be safer there than it is in Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia.
And they didn't start letting black troops in until after the war start. You know how races you've got to be to pas No, you can't for America. We'll do it first, Uh all right, we getting I asked, well, come on over here, black folks. All right, we won't
go and let you in just a little. I'm not sure if that was the exact memo or how it was discussed, but it's definitely an interesting dichotomy in the sense that you want to have pride for something that is also you want to have pride in a place that is also you know, mistreating you Richard as a veteran when you enlisted, how much was the thought of the inequities that still trouble America? How much did that play a role in you choosing to enlist or even being hesitant to enlist initially?
Yeah, I mean I think like the first thing I can think of is I joined shortly after Obama was elected, and so it was like this momentum, like we have a black you know, commander in chief, the first black president. So maybe there was something, Naiva say. I was also young,
and young people tend to join. You're talking about even in World War Two, the predominant, like the majority of folks that were joining or were like nineteen and twenty and twenty one, These your young people, right, So I think I was naive around the inequities, and my story kind of bears out kind of all of the lessons learned over the last decade since I went to Afghanistan.
And talking with other black soldiers. Was there any sense of community or is it kind of every man for himself when you're dealing with inequities within the armed services.
I think it depends on where you end up getting stationed.
When I was in training, I think that you know, we kind of congregated based off of race. I just naturally folks kind of gravitated to the folks that they were kind.
Of wanting to be around.
And then I ended up being stationed at a small base in Germany, a former Nazi base actually in bomb Holder, Germany, where it was predominantly white. I had only a few black soldiers that I could even befriend, let alone kind of build community with. And that was actually probably the beginning of the awakening, right because I was kind of
thrust from going up. I was a student at Morehouse about a year and a half before, and then suddenly I dropped out of Morehouse and found myself at the middle of Bombholder, Germany around a bunch of Midwestern white boys, and it was just it was different. I remember that first like six months, that first six months going into the going into work, and like the kinds of conversations that these folks were like engaging in, like you know, they was just kind of skewing the things that they
were hearing all Fox News. It was happening back in twenty and ten, right right right after Obama had got elected and.
All those things. So it was discouraging.
I remember coming to work and kind of like just was it was always kind of an awakening every single day with how ignorant folks could be, how prejudicial folks would be, how sexist and homophobic folk could be, let alone,
how racist folks could be. So after about about six months, I just I stopped engaging in the dialogue because it was exhausting and I had to prepare to go to war, right and with these same people, right, So I felt like I was just kind of a losing battle to try to feel like I could change their minds or all they needed was one more conversation for me, or one more one more book to read, or one more
book recommendation to you know, edify themselves. And you know, these folks aren't really interested in learning.
How do you have like in upon and listening, How do you possess a sense of pride in something that is not fixed within that organization? Like if we just go with the Harlem Hill Fighters, right, all right, Harlemhill Fighters they go over to France during World War One, they whoop a lot of ass, they get a lot of metals, and then they come home and they can't even be in their own parade for the home coming to even celebrate that you made it back safely to America.
And then you look at groups like the Tuskegee Airmen who had a lot of their accomplishments overlooked. And it was a long time before we really in my opinion, properly gay those brothers. They're flowers. So how much did you identify with the black person's relationship with the military of the past and reconcile that with the present? And you know, why are these black service members? Why are they so important to military history.
I think what's powerful about black military service is that Black Americans have always been fighting two wars at the same time. They've been fighting for equality within the military, but they've also been trying to fight to make America actually up to its ideals. I think that's true in World War One with the hom heel fighters, It's true in World War Two with Tuski Airmen and all the more than million black Americans who served, And it's true
after the military becomes deserogated. That even once military deserogates in nineteen forty eight and you see some improvements, the kind of military that Richer was a part of still has racial discrimination as a key part of it. It is still facing a lot of the challenges with regards to racism that are fully meshed in the culture of
the military. And so I think is powerful about the fact that Black Americans have continued to serve the country is that they're truly demanding the country be a better version of itself. They are trying to articulate and trying to bring in into being a better version of the United States.
And rich the same question to you, how did knowing those stories of the journey of black people through the military, you know, how much did you feel a connection to that?
You know, early on, I.
Think that it really actually happened after I'd gotten out. I came I came back, finished my last three years in the military. While I was kind of matriculating the beginning of the Black Lives Matter movement was kind of proliferating in the country. I was kind of struggling to reconcile my service. I wasn't connected to a lot of vets right, like even fewer vets that serve now that they did back then. So there wasn't a lot of
community to discourse with or engage with. And it's really what was the impetus to my project was the desire to kind of better understand the inequities that were that. So I'll start with uh, you know, Unfortunately, I had a suicide attempt about a year after getting out of the military. Like I said, I was really really struggling to reconcile my service and you know PTSD that I'd had and just didn't feel like I was getting the
support that I needed. And when I was in the psych world, we could didn't have TVs, we didn't have
any you know, anything to engage. So I had people for bringing me books and I read a book called When Affirmative Action Was White, a book by Irakats Nelson, a professor out of Columbia, and there are two chapters in it that focused on the GI Bill And essentially this is wide social welfare program right after World War Two that enabled many people to gain access to zero VA back home asso, the ability by a home for the first time, to ability go to school, and it
was the first time that I really like sat with the history that black folk were mostly locked out of that. So shortly after getting out the Psyche ward, I went to an event because I was unemployed and the event was for unemployed vets, and it just struck me that the majority of that room was black, and so for me, it was like, Yo, there's this history that I just
engaged with. That's very clear. I'm in the midst of this Black Lives Matter movement, the ascension of Trump is happening, trying to figure out how I can be of utility
and reconcile my service. And then I'm seeing, like, you know, get to googling for a couple of weeks, trying to do research and seeing that there's really no this history isn't connected to the present day, and how can we be having a racial justice conversation as a country and it seems not to be happening in this institution which historically has always had a race problem.
And then kind of talking about some of my experiences.
As well, I was beginning to connect the dots in like this invisible kind of issue of race still permeating in the military, and wanting to do a project that would really kind of tie the historical threat for people and make things plain and simple.
And so that's what we've really been trying to do for the last five years.
Let's talk a little bit about that for a second, because your time in the army, you know, after that, you wrote a New York Times article a couple of years ago entitled Serving in the Army as a queer black Man opened my eyes to racism in America. Now, within your time enlisted, were you openly queer and if not, what type of layers did that add to being within the military.
I came out when I was sixteen, and I think part of even my experiences at Morehouse is trying to reconcile what that meant, right to be a young black man and to be gay. So I came in with a good sense of myself and I think that's partly why I survived the military and then but I had I came in at the height of donational hotel. I couldn't be out, you know, in the military, and that was something that I was aware of going into it.
But it took about two years between training and that first year being at my duty station getting ready for war, and you know, ultimately, you know, you know, only hide so much, right, And so I was facing a lot of sexual harassment a lot of folks. It kind of rumors were floating in the way and way in which
people were engaging with me. And on top of I think like some racist based actions and like just some some things that a lot of black folks face when they're like, you know, significantly diminished or like, uh, they're not, We're not We're not mentored.
In the same ways. We're kind of set up for failure in a lot of ways.
So I definitely think like me being gay played a role up until that point. But right before I went a deployment, I was like, yo, I might go to Afghanistan and die. So I'm not about to go there without folks, you know, the people that I'm working with directly knowing that you know, I'm gay and I'm not
something that I'm ashamed of. So I came out to my to my direct unit, the folks that I was working with, specifically the physicians because I was a combat medic and my other medics, and they were largely supportive, right, but I was also it just it just so happened that a policy had passed where they do Na's hotel was still in place, but it was under review and so they weren't kicking anybody actively out right, And it's just that that window of time, and then the policy
actually changed on my birthday in Afghanistan, about nine months into my deployment.
Did you here's here's a here's a here's a personal question, but I feel compelled to ask it. By dealing with discrimination from sexual orientation and then dealing with discrimination well sexual orientation rumors and then dealing with racial discrimination, you would combat medic. Did you regret signing up for the one mos that requires you to maybe help somebody that might have been talking shit to you the day before on base.
I never resented being a combat metic because I think I got.
To if you never had a moment where you're like, these are the people I got to save if they get shot.
No, I mean, I would say one of the most racist people that I engaged with was actually a physician that was in charge of all of us.
Right, So you know.
I remember Martin Luther King day and I'm a morehouse man. Sometimes Martin Luther King's on TV. I want to give him a shout out. And it was playing in our age station, and he was like, turn that troublemaker off, and he literally like what he said.
Right, and he said that it was like something out of a movie. I was like, what is happening?
Because he started talking about how Martin Luther came down there and he was older, older gentleman, he came down to keep us from Alabama and said it came down and made all this trouble and my mammy got all worked up. And he was talking. He basically had he had a mammy. I never met someone who had one, but he had.
Yeah.
It was just like something like that, right, But here's somebody in charge of like the career trajectory of these soldiers, let alone the kinds of engagements that we might have with the soldiers of color, queer folks, whatever, local Afghan populations and what have you. So, yeah, that opened my eyes, but I never regretted being a combat medic. At the end of the day, helping people is helping people.
So you ain't you ain't never seen somebody that was on the battlefield messed up and then you just walk up to.
Never had the opportunity.
Nah, nah, let me just stop right there.
Matthew before we go to the break. You know, everybody talks about the struggles of the black man. But if the black man got it bad on the Monday and the Tuesday, then the black and get it bad all week. Who were some of the other unsung black military heroes
in the military during that time, particularly black women. Let's take a moment to educate people on you know, just not only what was necessarily going on on the front lines with black men, but also with black women in any and all support capacities, if not combat.
So within the military, there were thousands of black women that participated in the Women's Army Corps. The largest group was a group called the six hundred and eighty eighth Central Postal Director of Itttalian that was under the command of Major Charity Adams. And this group's job, once I got sent to England in nineteen forty four, was to distribute mail throughout the European theater, which is actually a really difficult thing to do because you had troops moving all the time.
These tudents were moving.
Back and forth across across France and Germany as the as ors progressing, and he had a lot of guys with common names, so they were trying to determine which Bob Jones was receiving this mail or which Tom Johnson was receiving this mail. But they developed these systems to get mailed distributed throughout the European theater and ended up moving about sixty five thousand pieces of male per day throughout the European theater. It was really important for true morale.
Both black and white soldiers talked about the importance of receiving male from home in terms of morale, But those black women had to face the kind of racism and sexism they would have been countered in the United States as well, and so in terms of where they could stay when they were in England, they had to fight to get access to hotels, get fight to get access to the Red Cross aid stations, and so every step
for them was a battle within the military. But they performed extremely important role in industry being the male throughout the European theater. On the home front, there are more than a million Black Americans participated in defense industries, and six hundred thousand of them were black women. And for them, the war industry has really opened up important job opportunities that just weren't there before the war. By and large, black women had opportunities outside the home only either in
agricultural work or being domestic servants for white families. And so a lot of these black women war workers. Essentially, they were like black Rosie derivats. They said, the war is what got them out of white people's kitchens. And so those again were month by month, week by week battles to get access these really well paid and important war jobs. So black women's work was crucial to winning the war.
Well, after the break, I want to talk a little bit about you know, we've talked a little bit about what the military was like, and we've gone a little bit of what it was like specifically for you, But I want to talk about what the military is doing right now to try and in some of this discrimination, and what other veterans are dealing with once they're on the other side of their military service. This is beyond the scenes. We'll be right back. Beyond the scenes. We
are back. We are talking about what it means to be black in the military, black man in the military, black and quer LGBTQIA plus in the military, what it means to be a black woman in the military, and we were talking, you know, during the break there, Richard, just a little bit. Also not only how black women were dealing with so many issues in trying to help the military during that time, but it seems that a lot of the issues that affected men also intersected with them as well.
Absolutely, one of the things that a lot of people don't know or that black women under the policies that don't ask, don't tell, were disproportionately affected. There's a new study that is getting ready to be published that shows that women broadly or in the last five years have been up to four to five times more likely to get a dishonorable discharge or other than honorable discharge, meaning they're getting into the military and leaving without access to
their benefits. There's still a wide variety of issue around sexual assault in the military, and the military hasn't done a good job of really forthrightly addressing that issue. And so you have all not only just discrimination kind of rearing its ugly head, but all these other issues and ways in which black women can and are marginalized that are often invisible to folks.
Yeah, then let's stay right there in that pocket, Matthew, because I've always joke, isn't the right world. But I've always said on stage that you know something going wrong in the military because they got their own court and they own jail. What of the job, you know, got their own jail. In line, damn is everybody breaking the rules? So how does the legacy of racism and white supremacy, how does that still haunt our military today?
Well, I think there's a through line in terms of how criminal justice works in the military, how it's worked historically, and how it works in the present.
In the World War two time period.
To pick up on what Richard was just saying, one of the ways that black Americans were treated unfairly was what they called blue discharges. These were written on blue paper, but they essentially kicked people out of the military without having to go through the court martial process for black troops who they considered to be troublemakers. And so the two primary populations that received these blue discharges were gay and lesbian troops at the time because that wasn't allowed
during World War Two, and then black troops. Anyone who organized or pushed back against the kind of racist treatment they're receiving on base would received one of these discharges, and that was a lesson honorable discharge, which meant that they had no access to the benefits that they had earned and worked for during the war. Fast forward into the present and a lot of those same issues remain with regards to how military justices carried out along lines
of race. I think this is where you see as much as the military has progressed, and I think there have been significant aspects of progress from the World War two area to the present, it's still in sitution that has a lot of the existing racial prejudices of the nation that in many ways it can't not have those when you're bringing together this wide cross section of demographics, race, gender,
sexuality from all across the country. If you get people in power who have pre existing racial biases, that's going to lead to disparate and unequal treatment for people of color in particular once they're in the military, and you see it reflected in the kind of legal punishments and court martials and other less and hounimble discharges that the black troops continue to get today.
We were talking at work about the NFL and black coaches, right and how that's a problem in terms of having more black coaches means that there has to be changes at the top higher than the level of coach. So that's GM, team president, owner or league officials. Right, So when you talk about eliminating racism, that's structural and institutional.
How much of this falls on people, Let's just say at the Pentagon level to stop with, Like if you look at like, say January six right, January sixth, I think it was like over twenty people that were active military, not like for military.
Yeah yeah, not like.
You got radicalized later after you let no, you was just at base yesterday. I'd be right back, Lieutenant got to run down to DC for some of the January's, I'd be right back. Yet, Like, how do you adjudicate that, how do you punish that? How do you regulate that when it's so ingrained, when you have monuments named after all of these Confederate generals? Like how do you stay And I hear you breathing already, Like how do you change any of this culture? Where the solution even begin?
It's complex?
Right, I think that we're the focus of the project that I've been tearing out of the course of the last few years has been is looking at the history first, and so you know, kind of focus almost exclusively on veteran affairs issues like these, the harms that have been done when it comes to the military itself, like race is a factor from recruitment to retirement, and there are multi faceted prongs when you have conversations about how to
address those things. Right, So let's just take recruitment for instance, we know, based off of the geospatial map study that was done on the city of San Diego, the majority of recruitment that was happening in black neighborhoods were for service oriented roles, right in low skill, low age really roles, and they were recruiting officers from white, affluent neighborhoods.
Right.
So we haven't been able to strapolate that study outward to see what's happening in other cities, but we can kind of take that as a model.
Right.
We know that just within the military itself has a broken equal unemployment opportunity system, right, the ways in which folks can make complaint plaints and adjudicate complaints without fear of retribution. The statistics show that folks don't try that process.
Trust.
Folks don't trust that system, right, So you're getting funneled into the military, oftentimes with only access to kind of service oriented roles. You have the academies. Really that these military academies, which more of the top brass, end up kind of being funneled through. You have a race issue really with recruitment and the ways in which they target black populations to attend those schools.
So that ends up having impact thirty.
Or forty years down the line when these people become the heads and leaders of the military, and then you have a white nationalist problem in the country. You know, the Pentagon doesn't want to be forthright and honest about right and the ways in which they tackle it because there is a very uncomfortable discourse around what does that mean? Around politics? Because what I found and the ways in which people were being radicalized. And I tell this this
story because it's an important one. Like I served on a former Nazi based in Germany. Right, it was not uncommon to see people walking around with mind Coft and reading it like for leisure.
Right, just white like sports illustrated.
Yeah, yes, yes, And and there were folks that were just in you know, and they would say, oh, I'm.
Just interested because not like a book on tape nothing like a kindle.
I mean, for all I know they have they had all those things. But yeah, bringing it to work and reading it, it was it was normal.
Right.
Fast forward four years, I'm getting out, I'm going to work. One day, shortly after getting out the military, I pull pull up on a paper and I realized there was a gentleman who we'd gone to basic training at the same place at the same time. I never I don't believe I've met this person, but we ended up being stationed at bomb Holder, which is a very small base in Germany at the same time, in the same unit, deploying to Afghanistan at the same time, getting out of
the military at the same time. You know, fast forward three years. He becomes a white nationalist, comes to New York to murder a black person, just a random black person. Radicalized, right, And to me, that's when everything started to I started to connect the dots more that, like, you know, the radicalization that's happening.
In the military.
Conspiracy theories were rampant in the military. Like I literally would be talking to commanders and they'd be talking about like, oh, FEMA camps are real, and like you know, and these are people that are entrusted with thousands of you know, the leadership of thousands.
Of people, potentially hundreds of people.
So you know, it's just, yeah, a radicalization in the in the in the in the in the army is really I think the big issue. But I look at like something someone like Bishop Garrison. He got appointed last year, uh, an appointment the first of its kind to report directly to the Secretary of Defense, and he lasted less than a year in that position, a black man who was appointed to oversee uh, you know, uh, the issues around race, the issues around diversity and inclusion, and within a year
he's being kind of pushed out it. You know, I you know, it's there's no easy solution, but there has to be a willingness to have the conversation.
And that's that's.
Something that's continuously pushed off because race still plays a major role, right, a major role for folks, and and they want to they want to keep that racial hierarchy, and there are folks in the military that that abide by.
There's deep historical roots for this as well. So there were countless stories of black troops during World War Two who saw white troops run up the Confederate flag either alongside or instead of the star stripes. Once they took over these towns in France, and you just have to stop and imagine, like, what.
Did that feel like?
That's what that look like to these black troops to see their fellow soldiers or their white countrymen praised the Confederate flag and they absolutely knew what they were doing, right, both sides did that. Everyone understood that was a signal for slavery and for a racial hierarchy that could be traced back to the Jim Crow South. Part of what was important about the military finally desegregated in nineteen forty eight is they recognized that racism and sererogation made the
military a less effective fighting force. That during the war, surrogation was stupid. It made no sense strategically right, you were doing everything in duplicated. It was justly complicated. They were segregating blood from white and black blood donors, even though there's.
No scientific basis to do that.
It's not because of political correctness or anything else that led them to desegrogated. It was due to intense political pressure from black activist but also to the fact that military leaders finally identified that we can take better advantage of the man power of the country if we actually are integrated. That they were turning away black Americans with PhDs, with language skills, with degrees from Harvard because they didn't
want to have black Americans serving in certain units. And so I think to Richard's point, there's been a lot of backtracking in the last couple of decades that one thing that comes out of Vietnam is you have once the military becomes an all volunteer force, you start to see vastly more numbers of Black Americans and Latin X
Americans participating in the military. You see many more minorities in the military in the past three decades, but you also see the development of a very intense and increasingly public white nationalists strain in the military, and it's hard for the military to have both those things coexist. You can't ask people of color to serve disproportionately to the percentage of the population while also still cultivating and not doing anything to counteract an intense white nationalist thread in
the military. Think, if there's any hope for where the military might go in the future, it's trying to recognize that it's really mission critical for the military to be a space where racism isn't part of the day to day culture that you want this to be a space we're all Americans who choose to serve can do so proudly.
I want to say one more thing. Racism is a spectrum.
Right, you have white nationalists, but you also have the everyday person who might have racial biases. But the way that they move, the way that they engage compounds over time and affects a black person's career, potentially in the military.
Right, So when we.
Have these conversations about racism, it's often like it kind of very easily goes to the white nationalists conversation when like the everyday racial bias and the attempts to try to intervene in that with education are being intervened, right or not being taken seriously. And I think what happened at West Point last year was a perfect example. When there was a class being stood up to essentially kind of engage with the concepts of seeing critical race theory.
It ended up on the Congressional floor, right with like members decrying that like, how dare we try to see to teach the former leaders of our military about the history of racist country and the systemic ways in which it shows up. And so anyway, I just wanted to put that in a conversation about racism being a spectrum.
On the other side of your military career when you retire, and we've kind of raised the surface a little bit, but let's stick in on this. What are some of the inequities and the types of benefits black veterans have received throughout history. My uncle is an army veteran and God bless him, this man and spent about the last five six years trying to prove that he has what they don't think he has. And he keeps getting sent to every single VA doctor that ain't got an appointment,
and it ain't get well. You had to get a second opin, got to do this paper. It's just a long ass dance. And not only what are the inequities that black veterans have received throughout history, but what impact has that had on veterans' access to housing and education and healthcare and just just general economic opportunities.
Historically it's had a huge impact. So the GI Bill was perhaps the most important piece of legislation in our nation's history. It's what enabled a whole generation of white veterans to come back and enter the middle class, to be able to raise themselves up and raise their families up because it provided access to low interest via backed home mortgages, provide access to college tuition benefits, loans, be able to start businesses, and range of healthcare benefits and
other benefits as well. But the way that legislation was written, it was largely authored by Southern Democratic politicians who are surrogationists, and so they made sure that legislation was distributed not at the federal level, but at the state and the local level, which meant that these local VA officials could discriminate, discriminate once black veterans came into these local offices, and so we have countless stories from nineteen forty six forty
seven of black veterans going to their local branches and just getting the run around, either being denied outright or being steered into vocational programs. And what they're trying to do is go to a four year college. They're being told that they can't use benefits for certain reasons, and in terms of mortgages, probably the largest portion of the benefits all across the country, black veterans find it impossible to get mortgages to live in the majority of neighborhoods.
It's true in New York and New Jersey, it's true in California. That has a dire long term impact in terms of the racial wealth gap. There's a group at Brandei's University called the Institute for Economic and Racial Equity that's been running some studies to try to calculate what the long term impact of this is. And what they found is that black veterans benefits from the GI Bill. For World War Two vets was only worth about forty percent of what white veterans got, and over a lifetime
that was about one hundred thousand dollars per veteran. Now you can imagine what that means in terms what black veterans from World War Two could pass on to their families. When you look at what should be very upsetting numbers in terms of the racial wealth gap in the country, a huge part of that can be traced back to
the GI Bill. And so historically this is really a fulcrum point in terms of how the country either could have moved closer to racial equity in terms of wealth the way their policy was written.
We moved in the other directions.
So the GI Bill opened up gaps between veterans that shouldn't have been their base on their service.
Yeah, and to piggyback off that, I think Matthew and I had a discussion last week. He had mentioned that, and I never really thought about it, but it makes perfect sense because a lot of folks assumed that Okay, well they weren't able to go to white schools with the GI bill, but there was an infrastructure at HPCs to absorb the number of black vets that were returning.
And so what you had was not only this stripping of generational wealth that could be passed down through home loans, but also the disappearance of a professional class that could have arised from you know, access to college education in maths. So really for the first time, and I think that has a direct correlation to the industrialization, what we see in inner cities throughout the fifties and sixties and seventies,
and urban plight. It has a direct correlation because that generational wealth compounded, the ability to be able to educate.
Yourself out of circumstance compounded.
And then I like to start around Vietnam, like you know, go from World War two to Vietnam, the nation's first fully integrated war, and Black vets were disproportionately being kicked out of the military continuously, over one hundred thousand of them kicked out without access to the benefits.
We've been talking.
Predominantly about the GI Bill, right, which is a huge social welfare program, very important, but disability compensation is another avenue of income in the thousands of dollars potentially a month that folks are not getting access to.
And we were able to prove that there.
Was a statistically significant disparity with respect to the denial rates that black vets were facing, and one of which were that over the our five year period from twenty fifteen to twenty twenty, black veterans were almost thirty percent
less likely to get disability for something like PTSD. And that's just in the most recent conflict, right, So we're going to the same wars and dealing with like all the things that you just said, discrimination and lack of access to genuine opportunity, and that has a psychological effect as well.
But these things aren't being taken serious when you go to the VA to.
Talk about like I have PTSD, and it might look different from a white VET, or maybe it does look the same as a white FET. But I'm still being denied this disability compensation. And so the case that's getting prepared now is actually a gentleman who served Vietnam by the name of Conly Monk, who I think is one of the most important black vets in modern American history. He served two tours of Vietnam, got kicked out his
last month in his second tour. He went from the age of nineteen to twenty one, serving two tours in the Vietnam. Like I said, he was from New Haven, and a white superior called him the end word. He got in a physical altercation. Forty years later, he still
doesn't have access to his benefits. Five years ago, in twenty fifteen, he was six years ago, he was able to win a landmark case with YEAH that gave anyone who had been discharged a dishonorable discharge or other denominal discharge, who had post traumatic stress disorder or traumatic brain injury
access to their benefits. What that means in real time is that they compensated him for three years of the back pay that they owed him, but they still owe him from all the pay that he didn't get all the way from nineteen seventy one, right, So now he is levying a suit against the VA, and his brother is suing on behalf of their deceased father who was a World War Two vetter and didn't get access to
the GI bill. Because another thing that we don't talk about is service is also intergenerational, So you have the same families often being stripped of access to these benefits and then it being compounded over time.
And so, yeah, Richard, you were fortunate in the sense that your mother took you in after your suicide attempt and was there to be an integral part in your growth and helping you out of the PTSD and helping you out of the depression and helping you back into the world of employment. There are a lot of veterans that do not have that type of care and concern within their family tree. How has the VA failed Black
veterans in the scope of just mental health? Like, at any point before your suicide attempt, did you ever feel like, well, maybe I should just go to the VA, and then a voice in your hair going, nah, they ain't gonna be able to do shit. Was there ever hesitant? See did you go to the VA. Did you seek out mental health services before the suicide attempt? Or was the attempt the first fissure you know in your stability at that.
Time, I did. I didn't know that I had PTSD, but I went to the VA. I sat down with a psychologist there and was basically told that I had something called adjustment disorder, which I don't know what that is, but talked to people since they were like, well, that's a form of PTSD, but a lot of that's a term that they basically used to say, oh, well, we can't really help, you don't have a lot of resources or whatever.
I just felt sidelined.
It took so much courage to try to go and actually have the conversation, because you know, people are proud. I'm a proud person, and I didn't want to admit that I had something wrong, especially being a combat medic, because I got to see folks who were really messed up, right, So in my mind, I'm like, well, I'm not a mess up as them, so I'm gonna be okay, I'm gonna go figure it out. But I went and was dismissed and then found myself even in what led to
my suicide attempt was then they started. They gave me an antidepressant, which in the law tim I found out I was bipolar, but they gave me an anti depression that made it ten times worse and that which led to my attempt. So it was just like mismanagement kind of all around because the things that I was expressing and trying to make plane wasn't being taken seriously.
I was just you know, so so yeah.
And I think by way of how the VA has failed, I mean, I think it has not wanted to address the fact that it has a race issue. There was a survey of VIA employees about two or three years ago, and of them it something of words of seventy percent said that they dealt with racism or they saw discrimination on their in their everyday jobs. Right of the of the employees that were actually surveyed. What does that mean for the black vets that have to actually go and
get get and get service there. And a story that actually happened recently this last year. There was an older black veteran that went to the VA was basically seeking help for PTSD and they'd forgotten about him.
He was there for hours.
He ended up killing himself inside the VA, right, And so these are just kind of added total conversations about just systemic failures because you know, our pain isn't seen as the same or what our experiences aren't as validated.
There's not enough cultural competency within the VA, and I don't know there are efforts to try to change that, but there are actors, just like there are actors that are entrenched in within the Department of Defense that just don't see race as an issue or purposely just want
to continue to have the disparities continue to ravage. And if we hadn't done the study with YM put pressure on, I don't know if they would have even said, hey, we should address the fact that there's a thirty percent disparity with PTSD.
I don't know, Matthew, what role does the American public play and contributing positively into the lives of veterans, because because like we we know we are in America, right, you know, we celebrate the veteran and we love that veteran. And then you go to the football game, everybody give it up for the veteran. Look at that veteran over there sitting there, and join the game and we clap for that veteran. We pride ourselves on honoring folks who
risk their lives on the battlefield. But throughout history, and we know what's going on in the present day, but throughout history, what has been the experience of black veterans returning home?
The experience of Black World or Two veterans returning home was that they were openly disrespected in the communities they came back to. They were on the wrong side of the GI Bill policy. By and large, they were openly harassed by a lot of white communities. Their stories of black veterans as soon as they got back on ships being directed white veterans this way, Negro veterans that way, and oftentimes they didn't use the polite term there.
There's hearing racial obtects as soon as they get off.
As soon as they get off a boat, they're being directed to not march their troops through white towns. They have to take a circuit as path it only goes through black towns. And there's at least a dozen black Order Two veterans who were murdered some wires still wearing their military uniforms because too many white citizens thought that these black veterans were going to be leaders in civilrice moment after the war, and black veterans were.
They were.
They came back and they demanded equal rights, They demanded the kind of freedom inmocracy their for abroad. But the kind of treatment these black veterans received was horrific and it was not fitting out their service. I think, thinking of the present, what does it mean for the American public to actually support veterans and troops is to think about what it means to support individual veterans and troops that I think too often you find yourself at supporting event.
Everyone will clap for the veterans when they stand up, which is great in theory. But then when push comes to shove and money's to being allocated to the VA, your money's to be allocated to support the actual lives of veterans, to make sure that they have the resources they need to re enter American side and to be able to thrive professionally. That's where we need the American public to stand up. It's not enough to say that one supports the troops or one supports veterans. At a
supporting event, you're kind of generically supporting the category. Then what you need to do is support the actual living people in your communities who served this country.
After the break, I want to talk solutions and Richard, I want to dig a little bit more into your program and what you were doing to help the veteran as my uncle calls it, veterans think that's how black people say, vet vetch vet trends. This is beyond the scenes. We'll be right back on. I want to end with
a couple questions about what we can do. You know, with regards to solutions and Richard, you have spent a lot of time sitting and building out this project that you've talked about a couple You've already mentioned it a couple times, but let's really pull back the layers on it.
You know, it's called the Black Veterans Project. With everything you've laid out today in terms of the systemic issues within it for enlisted officers and the issues that retired officers deal with, are you optimistic about seeing progress around the issues of racial equity within the military, because you know you'll start a project, I'm going to solve the problem, and then you look at the problem you'd be like, whoah shit.
Yeah, absolutely, I mean I wouldn't be doing this if I didn't feel like we could have an impact.
I think, I look at what we've done over the last four years.
It really started with the idea that you know, when I was googling black vet, nothing really showed up except a few miscellaneous organizations, of whom we've begun to collaborate with.
Some of them.
A lot of older black vet Black Vets have been organizing forever. Right, there are black vet organizations as old as out of World War One.
Right.
I got to go to an old American legion that's a historically black American legion, and they were founded by returning black gis who didn't have anywhere else to go, and they formed community and they ended up doing amazing things. But my generation is what understands the Internet, right, and so when I started the project, I realized that like their history just wasn't being told and there wasn't enough coverage.
So I think, you know, we've been part and parcel to the proliferation of a lot.
Of storytelling around, specifically with the press, like working with the press and edifying journalists and making sure that folks are talking about this in the digital sphere around like just historical contributions, but also like the inequities, just making sure that the inequities aren't lost. It's very easy to put up a photo of the Tuskegee Airmen and say, oh, that's enough, But then you're not talking about how some of those men were obstructed from the GI build and
the compelling generational impact, right. So I just wanted to kind of force a more rounded conversation and then you know what we've been able to glean by way of data and then kind of connecting researchers and folks that are really interested in reparations for black vets, because.
That's really at the heart of the work that we've been doing is that I.
Believe and we believe that veterans are the best position to push forward. Black vets are the best position to push forward a conversation about reparations in this country, especially because we don't have to go all the way back to slavery. We can talk about something that was done in the last one hundred years, let alone the last fifty to sixty years that has been affecting black black veterans.
But also when we talk about black vets, we're also talking about black families the black community, right, They're not mutually exclusive.
So yeah, So then to that point, Matthew, can we can we legislated? Is there anything being done on a policy level to combat racism within the ranks of the military, because I always feel like the military, like you have
the federal government. In my opinion, you have the federal government and then you had the military, and like, the military is always treated as this weird annexed fifty first state, if you will, that has their own jail, their own court, their own funding, their own little network of hospitals and everything. How can DC better legislate stuff, you know, even beyond reparations. Is that even happening right now?
Yeah? Let me answered in two ways.
So on the military side, absolutely, I mean, theoretically, the military is a taxpayer funded institution and it should be accountable to the kind of treatment that Americans who serve their country are receiving. I think the question of when the military observes racism happening, whether it's those explicit asks of racism or it's the kind of day to day perpetuation of racism that harms black trips and people of color in the military and prevents them from having long
sustained beneficial careers. Those are things that the military can hold troops to account for. That's going to take work, it's going to take action, it's going to take leadership. But the military is nothing if it's not a structured organization. It's a hierarchical organization. So if military leaders say this is going to happen, and they hold their supportinents to account, that is something that can change if the American public demands it.
The change and the other piece.
Picking up what Richard was saying about policy legislation, there was a legislation that was introduced last year called the GI Bill Restoration Act that would go a long way towards addressing the wrong of the GI Bill and the racial discrimination that happened there. It was introduced on Veterans' Day twenty twenty one, just last year, by Seth Moulton and James Clayburn and the House representatives, and by Raphael Warnock.
In the Senate.
What that legislation would do is it would provide those Gibul benefits to the descendants of Black World or two veterans who had been denied those benefits, so would enabled them to be able to use it for home loans or for college tuition. That's a small piece of a much larger conversation about reparations. But reparations is about repairs both the financial aspect and trying to make right the kind of benefits that these black veterans should have received.
But also it's about acknowledging that this was wrong. This was something that black veterans had earned through their service in World War Two that had been denied to them, and so just the possibility of passing legislation beyond the very important financial aspect would do justice to the service of these black veterans and help to repair that wrong.
I want to end optimistically, what can we the regular people of the world do to properly honor and support veterans other than letting them board first on the airplane and giving them fifty five cent coffee at fast food establishments, because we all know that's what fixes all of these issues, being able to get on the plane first. What else can we do, Richard, I'll start with you.
There are abundance of policies that have been pushed forward to try to address the issue of race in the military, But how can the American public I think one, it's edifying themselves on the necessity of ensuring that a piece of legislation like the Giblo Restoration Act can actually do
some level of repair. They have intent to try to break that bill up, to try to pass components of it next year, specifically the housing provision in the one hundred and eighteenth Congress, which would give quite literally potentially millions of African Americans access to zero VA back home loans. But we already know that there is still a rampant discrimination with respect to black folks access to home loans. Right we need let alone home appraisals and all these
other things. So what is the private sector doing also to just ensure that the landscape is set so that this reparations can potentially be instituted in a way that can actually have an impact. Because as it stands now, we might pass this bill by the grace of God, and the impact that it could have had is undermined by the lack of public awareness and also a lack of real due diligence with respect to how we actually get this bet to fit in the hands of the
families that have been affected. Because it's also an invisible wound. Right, And I'll say this as the last part. It's like one in engaging with a lot of journals specifically around World War Two in the harms of the and access to the GI Bill, is that a lot of families don't even know that this happened to them, right, or I can't even fully articulate it. And you have a
whole generation that very close to not being with us anymore. Right, But their families certainly bear the scars economically, at least of in access to the GI Bill. So I think the biggest thing that the American public can do is educate themselves, engage with the history by half American read read a book.
Honestly, I think that.
That is like the best way so that we're not engaging ignorant based discourse.
Matthew, how do we support I'm a historian, so I'll say the same thing I say to my students that the stories we tell about the past matter. And so I think a first starting point is really reckoning, honestly with the history of our country, particularly when it comes to military that black Americans people of color have served this country.
Throughout our nation's history.
They've been deeply, deeply patriotic, but that service hasn't always been repaid, and so I think a starting point is recognizing that veterans have been treated unequally throughout American history, and particularly with the story about World War Two. I think in the present, I think it's important to talk about veterans as actual living people. I think we're at a point right now in our country where the military is drawn from about one percent of the entire yeo's population.
So you have the one percent who serves in the ninety nine percent of everyone else, and we've fallen into this trap where veterans are treated as heroes as a sort of generic category, but then too often ignored as individuals, particularly for black veterans and veterans of color. That is a disservice to veterans and also to the larger American public.
I think as citizens who are not in the military are not veterans, we have to treat veterans as sort of actual living and breathing people who deserve the benefits that they earned and deserve to be welcome back into American communities and given all the support they need to find careers professional pathways that do justice to the important work they did within the military.
Well, I can't thank you all enough for this wonderful, wonderful conversation. I appreciate you all for going beyond the scenes with me today. That's all the time we have. Thank you to our guests Richard and Matthew, and be sure to check out Matthew's new book, Half American, the epic story of African Americans fighting World War Two at home and abroad. Thank you both, Thanks Lit, Thank you
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