Rallying around the flag: why some people of color support Bush's "War on Terror".

Jennifer Thorpe, president of the Students United for America, found her calling in the war against terrorism. Her group sends gifts to the troops and holds rallies at Columbia University supporting the war effort. Thorpe, who is white, proudly compares their diversity to that of 20 antiwar protesters who surrounded an April 2 rally on campus.

"We had a little of everybody, but the antiwar people were all white," she says.

Rallies designed to praise the White House, sustain the troops, and shame anti-war demonstrators drew crowds ranging from 100 to 25,000 in places like Atlanta, Los Angeles, San Antonio, Hartford, De Kalb, Cleveland, San Jose, and Lubbock and dozens of other cities and towns.

Contrary to common perception--and some say common sense--a handful of people of color have joined these ranks.

Because black and Latino communities have traditionally offered up disproportionate numbers of their young to the armed forces, and because the war involved an enemy of color, the presence of people of color became a measure of the pro and anti-war movements' connection with the regular person, their relevance and legitimacy.

The Administration has stretched itself to present a colorblind face that includes blacks, Asians, and Latinos in cabinet-level positions. That national strategy now appears in the efforts to activate people of color to counteract accusations that the invasion of Iraq was racist and colonialist. But few people of color supporting the war appear to have substantial bases in their own communities. Instead, opinion in communities of color hinges more on factors such as lack of economic and educational opportunities, overrepresentation in the military, and strong pressure to show their patriotism and stake their belonging to the U.S.

Like the anti-war movement, the pro-war contingent uses the disproportionate numbers of people of color in the armed forces to justify their position. Blacks make up 12 percent of the general population, but 21 percent of the armed forces. Together, blacks and Latinos make up 31 percent of the general population, but 34 percent of the armed forces. Black women make up half of the Army's female enlistees, although they are only 7 percent of the overall population.

Some communities have seen military service as a way to prove their patriotism and shame the government into providing equal rights. For example, the Canastota, New York-based newspaper Indian Country Today reported that war support is high among Native Americans, nor surprising since one in four Indian men is a veteran. The article noted that 40,000 Native Americans signed up to serve in World War I. Currently, there are 15,547 Native Americans in the armed forces--the first female casualty in Iraq, Lori Piestewa, was a Hopi woman from Arizona.

"They didn't go in for the education or the money, but the honor and respect of their people," says Gulf War veteran Keith Heavyrunner (Blackfeet) in the article.

But there are also material reasons for people of color joining the military. For immigrants, the military offers political benefits. Soldiers can apply for citizenship after serving three years. Last July, President Bush made them immediately eligible to apply for citizenship. In early April, the new Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Service granted citizenship posthumously to a Filipino and a Mexican marine.

Army veteran and Columbia student Eric Chen, a Taiwanese-American, leads the Students United for America effort to reverse the campus expulsion of ROTC, which took place in 1969. He supports the war, and he also uses diversity arguments to rationalize ROTC'S return. Their flyer claims: "A vote for ROTC is a vote for affirmative action."

"It's very easy for me to draw parallels as far as advocating the military issue," said Chen. "The military is filled with all the races because America is a diverse country. If you discriminate against the military, you're discriminating against American society."

War of Opinion

Polls in late April have played up the racial division in war support. In March, news outlets cited poll results that black support for Operation Iraqi Freedom was rising, but it was far lower than white support. Latino opinion landed almost exactly between black and white. After the war started, support numbers rose in all communities, a predictable reaction since most communities usually tone down their anti-war feelings once the bombs started dropping.

Bill Fletcher, head of the Trans Africa Forum who has been active in the national anti-war formation United for Peace and Justice, is one of many who question the validity of these polls. The way poll questions are framed-such as, "Do you support the president and troops in time of war?"--favors a pro-war response.

Fletcher also points out that the war support among Latinos may be distorted with the inclusion of Cuban Americans. Cuban exile support for the war is predictable, says Fletcher, since Cubans generally saw Baghdad as "another step closer to Havana."

"If we pulled out the Cuban numbers from the polls," says Fletcher, "I bet the Latino numbers would come much closer to black opposition."

The most prominent spokespeople of color who supported Operation Iraqi Freedom are leaders of ethnic organizations, some of which are very small or otherwise marginal. They're also mostly men who self-righteously, sometimes outrageously, vilify their opposition. Much of the mainstream media treats them as perfectly legitimate sources, despite the fact that their rhetoric goes far beyond run-of-the-mill traditionalism.

Ky Ngo, head of the Vietnamese American Community of Northern California, organized a rally in downtown San Jose on March 16, which drew more than 2,000 Vietnamese. He says 5,000 would have come if it hadn't rained. Ngo equates the war against Iraq with the war against the Viet Cong.

"Saddam Hussein is like Ho Chi Minh," he says. "They commit the same crimes, have the same guilt, they are mass murderers. President Bush is our chief commander. We elected him, we have to follow his orders."

Ngo admits that few other ethnic communities tallied: "They come here for economic reasons, for immigration, but the Vietnamese, we are political refugees. Many Americans take freedom for granted. They don't know the sacrifice, the high price you have to pay for freedom."

Anti-communism also emerges as a theme for some black neoconservatives who are making their voices heard. Jesse Lee Peterson and Kevin Martin present themselves as an antidote to the messages of prominent black anti-war leaders.

Peterson directs the Brotherhood Organization for a New Destiny, a black Los Angeles-based organization with a mailing list of 12,000. Peterson, who appears frequently on Fox TV and talk radio, has a particular beef against the civil rights establishment, whom he calls "problem profiteers."

"Most black Americans have been so brainwashed, dumbed down and turned away from this country that they were angry about the war at first. When you're patient with them and lay out the facts, many of them come around," he says "Jesse Jackson and so-called civil rights leaders and many other black politicians are really communist socialist pigs."

Navy veteran Kevin Martin is the political/government affairs director for the African American Republican Leadership Council and has been in three Gulf deployments. The Council directs the black swing vote to support Republican candidates wherever possible, and runs black Republicans for open seats or against Democrats of color. Martin was one of the few people, of any color, who gave press interviews defending Trent Lott's glorification of Strom Thurmond.

Insisting that people of color should push the U.S. military to pick the righteous side of third world conflicts, Martin initially doesn't sound very different from anti-war speakers.

"The U.S. supported dictators in places like Chile, Argentina, Nicaragua. There were whole families that disappeared in those places," he says. "Blacks and Latinos have to make sure these things don't happen again."

But the Council's ability to reach black people is highly questionable. An op-ed by Gene Weingarten in The Washington Past points out that all but two of the Council's 15 advisory board members are white. Weingarten called up Missouri State Representative Sherman Parker (R-Sr. Charles), an African American listed on the Council website as its national director, to find Parker denying that he had agreed to take the job or that he had ever seen the website.

Spokespeople like these, who are so rabidly anti-communist, who seem so disconnected from the effects of U.S. military action and Jim Crow, have not convinced people of color enough to get them to actually do something, outside of an anomaly like the Vietnamese march.

Bill Fletcher recognizes the challenges of getting people of color to work actively against the war, but doesn't feel threatened by the reports of pro-invasion sentiment.

"It's bankrupt," he says, "historically, morally, politically bankrupt. They can pull out some people to carry the line, but at the level of the mass base, certainly with black America, it's going nowhere."

Rinku Sen is publisher of Colorlines.