By Sikivu Hutchinson
In 1919, Wilbur Little returned home to
Blakely, Georgia after serving in World War I.
Instead of being heralded as a hero he was savagely attacked in public
by white thugs. The mob forced him to
take off his uniform and strip to his underwear. When he refused to obey the
mob’s demand that he never wear his uniform in public again he was lynched.
Little was murdered during the so-called “Red Summer” of 1919
when race riots instigated by whites swept the nation, fueled by postwar
tensions over jobs, housing and the wave of African Americans moving to
Northern cities. Isabel
Wilkerson recalls the irony of his lynching in her landmark work on the Great
Migration The
Warmth of Other Suns. Instead of being treated
like heroes, black World War I veterans were subjected to white hostility and
outright terrorism. "America the Beautiful" hypocrisy was never more so than in
its treatment of soldiers of color hoodwinked into believing Jim Crow violence
would magically dissipate with military service.
During World War I, families who’d lost relatives in
combat were dubbed
Gold Star families. Because Wilbur Little
was lynched on American soil, his family never received this designation, his
death due to one of the longest wars the U.S. has waged—one against its own
black “citizens”.
Decades later, this paradox still resonates when it
comes to the fraught question of African Americans and other people of color
serving a “democratic” war machine—to paraphrase conscientious
objector Muhammed Ali—based on inhumane, imperialist militarism towards
nations of color. The recent flap
over the Khan family’s DNC speech—parents of slain Gold Star soldier Humayan
Khan, viciously maligned by Donald Trump and catapulted into the national arena
as symbols of Muslim Americans’ unappreciated sacrifices to “flag and Country”—
highlights the divide between the aspirations of immigrants of color and the
homegrown reality of white Christian supremacy.
No matter what the “good” upstanding immigrant/person of color does to meet
the litmus test of American patriotism they will never be validated by the
dominant culture as human/citizen/hero—especially in times of nativist backlash.
In his DNC speech, as well as during his TV appearances, Khizr Khan trumpeted
the exceptionalist line, invoking the Constitution and proclaiming (in response
to the outpouring of support the couple received after Trump’s tirade) that “every step they [the U.S.] take, the world emulates
it.”
Throughout the GOP and Democratic conventions, both
parties predictably trafficked in flag waving bombast and paeans to American
exceptionalism. Awash in “Greatest
Nation” platitudes, the DNC was capped by Hillary Clinton and President Obama’s
repeated invocations of the slaveholder-rapist founding fathers.
Of course, one of the most eloquent (semi) antidotes
to this propaganda came when Michele Obama referenced the slave legacy of the
White House’s construction. The First
Lady thoughtfully summoned the image of her daughters romping on a lawn that
black folk tending to antebellum plantations could only have dreamed of. It was a subtle, albeit unintended, rebuke of
the rabid Christian fascism spewed by Ben Carson the week before when he
proclaimed that secular progressives are “antithetical” to the principles of
the founding fathers. In true lunatic
fringe mode, Carson went off the rails about the Dems being in league with
Lucifer, while Michele Obama highlighted the subtext of America’s New Jim Crow reality
in which the descendants of the White House builders are in another kind of
bondage, one cosigned by the Clinton/Obama administrations.
For his part, president Obama sounded the theme that
everyone on the planet strives to emulate the U.S. “American democracy works”, Obama
declared. “Gone” were the record numbers
of black and brown inmates incarcerated in American jails, prisons and juvenile
detention facilities during his time in office. “Gone” were the drones that his
administration has unleashed on thousands of Middle Eastern civilians marked
for death in the name of American democracy.
Against this backdrop of imperialist devastation, the
Khan’s display of patriotic heartbreak was tragically ironic and all too
familiar. Similar appeals touting the
heroism and basic decency of Muslim-Americans were made in the wake of 9/11’s
anti-Muslim backlash. Whether viewed
through the lens of 1919 or 2016, when it comes to the sacrificial bodies of
people of color, this message of patriotic “redemption” is just another
narrative that the “Greatest nation” will always manipulate to sugar coat its
sin of endless occupation.
