Advantages and Human Costs of Military Empire

Abstract

African Americans, having experienced segregation, race riots, and other forms of bigotry in their military service during World War II, might have been ambivalent about joining the armed forces in the years following. One might also conjecture that a sense of solidarity with Asians as fellow people of color subjected to racial discrimination would have caused African Americans to balk at the prospect of participating in the occupation of Japan and the Korean War. Michael Cullen Green cogently counters such notions in his compelling study of African American military personnel in Japan and Korea from the end of World War II into the 1950s and black periodicals' and Asians' responses to these servicemen. The enlistment and reenlistment of tens of thousands of African Americans in this period indicates that many considered service as preferable to the possibility of unemployment or low wages as a civilian and even welcomed the chance to live in occupied Japan and to prove themselves in combat in Korea. Moreover, maintains Green, although some African American intellectuals and leftists denounced the U.S. military as imperialistic and asserted that black servicemen were being forced to kill Koreans in a race war waged for the benefit of whites, such views were not widely shared among African Americans. Green finds that “Black military service abroad encouraged African Americans to share many of the same racialized attitudes toward Asian peoples held by their white counterparts, to think of themselves first and foremost as Americans (and not as members of what some activists claimed was a global ‘colored’ community), and to identify with their government's foreign policy objectives in Asia (if not its every strategic decision)” (p. 2). Prejudices against Japanese and Koreans, combined with the personal benefits of military service, generated substantial support for U.S. military empire in East Asia among African Americans—not just service personnel, but also in the civilian population.