On Saturday, a bill to repeal the Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy of the United States’ armed forces was passed by the Senate, and now has no visible hurdles before becoming law. While the repeal of DADT is a good thing, I think it might be a good time to take a step back here, and raise a couple of issues.
First, although this means that servicemen and women who identify as gay or bisexual can serve without being afraid getting fired, it doesn’t mean that life in the military will be any easier. The barbeques on base are not immediately going to start resembling Lady Gaga concerts because, I imagine, most of those who are affected by this bill are likely to keep their sexuality under wraps. Homophobia is not going to disappear from the military overnight.
Second, we should think about the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell in the context of broader changes in understandings of civil rights in the United States, changes that are often precipitated by the military, or because of American militaristic aims. Ever since the black seaman Dorie Miller, a mess hall cook, manned anti-aircraft guns at Pearl Harbor, leaders have capitalized upon the eagerness of Americans to sacrifice for a country that has systematically discriminated against them.
During World War II, the military paraded Miller and other African Americans around so as to promote a unified citizenry and dissuade racial conflict. Documentary films like The Negro Soldier, the result of collaborations between the Signal Corps, the Office of War Information, and Hollywood, projected an image of a multicultural fighting force, even as troops were still segregated and minorities were given the worst, menial jobs. And features such as Hollywood Canteen dramatized the co-mingling of black, Asian, and Native American soldiers, even as the real Hollywood Canteen, a club in Los Angeles that Bette Davis created for servicemen on shore leave, was under investigation by the FBI because Davis refused to segregate its visitors.
In American government policy, political discourse, and mass culture, civil rights became entangled with ideas about service to the nation. Prisoners at Manzanar and other Japanese-American concentration camps (the U.S. government’s preferred terminology at the time) were only allowed to leave the camp if they swore allegiance to the country that had locked them up, and if they voluntarily enlisted to join the front lines in Europe. Thus thousands of Japanese and other minority soldiers died, with the understanding that their sacrifice was a means to prove their Americaness.
The cold war provoked leaders like Truman, Eisenhower and Kennedy to think about civil rights almost solely in terms of the strategies of a global war. Communists, not only in the Soviet Union, but also those who were dedicated to the struggles of third world liberation movements around the world, pointed to racism and segregation as proof of the hypocrisy of Western democracy. When Truman desegregated the military, he did it to ensure the survival of American hegemony.
For much of the following decade, Hollywood movies spoke in terms of race almost exclusively within the context of military service. And none of them questioned the inanity of making minorities prove their devotion, at the cost of their own blood, to a country that still withheld equal rights. The policy of “Double Victory” that animated African American troops to volunteer in the war against fascism had backfired; The assumption that the subjugated would find equality after proving their loyalty in World War II became a perpetual call for minorities to voice their grievances within the bounds of the conservative nationalism of the early cold war.
As Melani McAlister has argued, the notion of a multi-cultural, egalitarian America has a greater currency in global politics now more than ever. When Barack Obama was elected president, he projected an internationalist image to his Muslim audience in a speech in Egypt for which he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, even as he continued to wage two wars in the region. I would argue that his ability to act as a black leader is terribly circumscribed by the necessity that he operate as an American one, but its only the latter that allows for the former.
It is unlikely that terrorists are passing out pamphlets in Pakistan that attack Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. But we might ask why this reform, that which allows gay men and women to die for their country, is being passed while there are still no laws that prevent employers from firing people for being gay, lesbian, bi-sexual or transgendered. Why is it that gay Americans can elect to protect their country, but the same country has elected not to protect them? Some, not all, gay men and women have voiced their opposition to Don’t Ask Don’t Tell in terms of patriotic sacrifice -- I just want to serve my country in a time of war. I don’t mean to entirely dismiss such language as a means to argue for equal rights. And certainly, jobs currently held by homosexuals in the military are diverse enough that it is unlikely that we will see masses of recently outed servicemen sent to the front lines to die in as overwhelming numbers as was suffered by the Japanese-American 442nd Infantry and other minority regiments in wars past. But I wonder if there is a disconnect between this movement and the broader struggle towards social justice, in the United States and abroad.
The 442nd
Does this mean, in repealing Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, that we are elevating an argument for equality that carries with it stipulations that reify militaristic nationalist sentiment and thus validate American global hegemony? Will the movement against Don’t Ask Don’t Tell backfire? I hope not, and I don’t want to overstress the historical parallels here.
In the essay “American Things,” Tony Kushner wrote that gay rights is the same as civil rights, the same as socialism. He championed the concept of America while dismissing the “fixed fetishes of democracy and freedom” and chastising those who saw the American experiment as a finished project, and American democracy as an excuse to tyrannize minorities.
“The only politics that can survive an encounter with this world,” he says, “is a politics that can encompass both the harmonics and the dissonance. The frazzle, the rubbed raw, the unresolved, the fragile and the fiery and the dangerous: These are American things.”
To be honest, I don’t really know what all of that means. But it strikes me as Bulosan-esque, and maybe it is along the lines of what’s missing in the discussion of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell.
First, although this means that servicemen and women who identify as gay or bisexual can serve without being afraid getting fired, it doesn’t mean that life in the military will be any easier. The barbeques on base are not immediately going to start resembling Lady Gaga concerts because, I imagine, most of those who are affected by this bill are likely to keep their sexuality under wraps. Homophobia is not going to disappear from the military overnight.
Second, we should think about the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell in the context of broader changes in understandings of civil rights in the United States, changes that are often precipitated by the military, or because of American militaristic aims. Ever since the black seaman Dorie Miller, a mess hall cook, manned anti-aircraft guns at Pearl Harbor, leaders have capitalized upon the eagerness of Americans to sacrifice for a country that has systematically discriminated against them.
During World War II, the military paraded Miller and other African Americans around so as to promote a unified citizenry and dissuade racial conflict. Documentary films like The Negro Soldier, the result of collaborations between the Signal Corps, the Office of War Information, and Hollywood, projected an image of a multicultural fighting force, even as troops were still segregated and minorities were given the worst, menial jobs. And features such as Hollywood Canteen dramatized the co-mingling of black, Asian, and Native American soldiers, even as the real Hollywood Canteen, a club in Los Angeles that Bette Davis created for servicemen on shore leave, was under investigation by the FBI because Davis refused to segregate its visitors.
In American government policy, political discourse, and mass culture, civil rights became entangled with ideas about service to the nation. Prisoners at Manzanar and other Japanese-American concentration camps (the U.S. government’s preferred terminology at the time) were only allowed to leave the camp if they swore allegiance to the country that had locked them up, and if they voluntarily enlisted to join the front lines in Europe. Thus thousands of Japanese and other minority soldiers died, with the understanding that their sacrifice was a means to prove their Americaness.
The cold war provoked leaders like Truman, Eisenhower and Kennedy to think about civil rights almost solely in terms of the strategies of a global war. Communists, not only in the Soviet Union, but also those who were dedicated to the struggles of third world liberation movements around the world, pointed to racism and segregation as proof of the hypocrisy of Western democracy. When Truman desegregated the military, he did it to ensure the survival of American hegemony.
For much of the following decade, Hollywood movies spoke in terms of race almost exclusively within the context of military service. And none of them questioned the inanity of making minorities prove their devotion, at the cost of their own blood, to a country that still withheld equal rights. The policy of “Double Victory” that animated African American troops to volunteer in the war against fascism had backfired; The assumption that the subjugated would find equality after proving their loyalty in World War II became a perpetual call for minorities to voice their grievances within the bounds of the conservative nationalism of the early cold war.
As Melani McAlister has argued, the notion of a multi-cultural, egalitarian America has a greater currency in global politics now more than ever. When Barack Obama was elected president, he projected an internationalist image to his Muslim audience in a speech in Egypt for which he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, even as he continued to wage two wars in the region. I would argue that his ability to act as a black leader is terribly circumscribed by the necessity that he operate as an American one, but its only the latter that allows for the former.
It is unlikely that terrorists are passing out pamphlets in Pakistan that attack Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. But we might ask why this reform, that which allows gay men and women to die for their country, is being passed while there are still no laws that prevent employers from firing people for being gay, lesbian, bi-sexual or transgendered. Why is it that gay Americans can elect to protect their country, but the same country has elected not to protect them? Some, not all, gay men and women have voiced their opposition to Don’t Ask Don’t Tell in terms of patriotic sacrifice -- I just want to serve my country in a time of war. I don’t mean to entirely dismiss such language as a means to argue for equal rights. And certainly, jobs currently held by homosexuals in the military are diverse enough that it is unlikely that we will see masses of recently outed servicemen sent to the front lines to die in as overwhelming numbers as was suffered by the Japanese-American 442nd Infantry and other minority regiments in wars past. But I wonder if there is a disconnect between this movement and the broader struggle towards social justice, in the United States and abroad.
The 442nd
Does this mean, in repealing Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, that we are elevating an argument for equality that carries with it stipulations that reify militaristic nationalist sentiment and thus validate American global hegemony? Will the movement against Don’t Ask Don’t Tell backfire? I hope not, and I don’t want to overstress the historical parallels here.
In the essay “American Things,” Tony Kushner wrote that gay rights is the same as civil rights, the same as socialism. He championed the concept of America while dismissing the “fixed fetishes of democracy and freedom” and chastising those who saw the American experiment as a finished project, and American democracy as an excuse to tyrannize minorities.
“The only politics that can survive an encounter with this world,” he says, “is a politics that can encompass both the harmonics and the dissonance. The frazzle, the rubbed raw, the unresolved, the fragile and the fiery and the dangerous: These are American things.”
To be honest, I don’t really know what all of that means. But it strikes me as Bulosan-esque, and maybe it is along the lines of what’s missing in the discussion of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell.
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