Certain white people, most notably twits like Tucker Carlson, are so afraid of acknowledging America’s racist track record that their only play is to lie and deny. The other day, during another Tucker rant about critical race theory (the rabid right’s new phantom enemy), he hosted Sean Parnell, a Pennsylvania Republican senatorial candidate, who predictably scoffed at the U.S military’s current commitment to diversity. God help us if this guy succeeds Pat Toomey. Basically, Parnell said that the Armed Services don’t need to correct for the past, because – this was his exact quote – “We have been a color-blind culture in the United States military for almost 200 years.”
See, this is the big problem with the MAGAts’ hatred of Black history: They think that ignorance is a fine substitute for reality. They think that if white folks ban the teaching of their racist legacy, then it’ll be easier to stay wedded to white supremacy.
Parnell’s whopper – about a 200-year “color-blind” military – demonstrated why we need more reality-based history lessons, not less. I bet that millions of Fox couch-potatoes allowed his lie to nest in the empty space between their ears. But here are some basic facts, a random handful, that they probably don’t want their kids to hear about in class. Some stuff that Parnell appears not to know:
1. Thanks to a pair of federal laws enacted in 1792 and 1795, limiting armed service to “able-bodied white citizens,” Black people were barred from the military until 1862. Then they were kept separate from white people until President Truman signed a desegregation order in 1948.
2. Black people were drafted to serve in World War I, but the vast majority of them were funneled into segregated manual labor – building roads, unloading trucks and ships, basically the grunt work. There was one all-Black combat unit, the 369th Infantry, but the white American generals refused to let it fight alongside their white soldiers. Instead, they assigned the unit to fight with the French.
3. The Jackie Robinson story. Sometimes one incident says it all. In 1942, the future baseball pioneer was drafted an assigned to a segregated unit in Kansas. In July 1944, as an Army second lieutenant, he was riding on a military bus in Texas, having spent a few hours at the local “colored officers club,” when the bus driver ordered him to move to the back of the bus. Robinson refused. The MPs were called, and he was handcuffed and shackled. Soon after, the brass tried to court-martial him; the charges were “behaving with disrespect” and “willful disobedience.” (On the night of the incident, he’d yelled, “Look here, you sonofabitch, don’t you call me no n—-r!”) Ultimately, he was exonerated. Republicans should like that story. It had a happy ending.
4. The Tuskegee Airmen story. In World War II, a sizeable number of Black Americans wanted to become fighter pilots, but the white brass’ consensus was that Blacks weren’t smart enough for the job. Plus, the U.S. Army War College had concluded in a 1925 study that “Blacks are mentally inferior, by nature subservient and cowards in the face of danger. They are unfit for combat.” Eventually, the military allowed some Blacks to train as pilots, but only in a segregated program. On the air base where all pilots were trained, commanding officers literally drew a line on the movie theater floor to separate the seating by race. And after Black pilots were fully trained, the Army Air Corps brass grounded them stateside for nine months, unwilling to let them fight in the air with white squadrons. Call me crazy, but that seems like history worth teaching – even if teachers are compelled to wear body cameras as a way to suppress their discussion of race. (A Nevada “pro-family” group likes that idea.)
So where in the world did Sean Parnell get the idea that the military has been “color-blind” for 200 years? Not even Trump University would’ve floated that beaut. The most obvious answer is that fear – in this case, fear of the truth – often makes fearful people say and do crazy things. Remember when right-wingers insisted that we needed a passel of laws to combat the purported epidemic of “Sharia law”? Remember 2018, when Trump said we were all endangered by the terrorist Trojan horse known as “the Caravan”?
What are these people so afraid of?
Critical race theory, in the strictest sense of the term, is a scholarly concept taught only in law schools and advanced graduate programs. Conservatives currently in freakout mode seem to think it’s an epidemic sweeping K through 12, despite the dearth of evidence. Their fallback strategy is to invoke the term whenever and wherever teachers try to enlighten kids about the realities of Black history. And CRT isn’t scary anyway; as law professor Kimberle Crenshaw points out, “Critical race theory just says ‘let’s pay attention to what has happened in this country…so we can become that country that we say we are.'”
I suppose that sounds “woke” – another word that the MAGAts deride as a pejorative – but Matthew Dowd, a former pollster for George W. Bush, has the best response to that: “If it is ‘woke’ to push back against racism, sexism, ignorance, lies, and autocracy, as well as demand equality for all and equal justice, then count me as woke.”