Sister, Uncle Sam Wants You Too

By Vanessa Huang, WireTap. Posted May 2, 2005.

When Rick Jahnkow speaks at youth conferences and visits classrooms with the San Diego-based Project on Youth and Non-Military Opportunities (Project YANO), he asks for a show of hands from people thinking about joining the military.

Over the past year, Jahnkow says, more and more young Latina women have been raising their hands.

There are already over 11,500 young Latina women serving in active duty, a significant part of the estimated 47,000 women of color currently in the military. According to Pentagon spokesperson Ellen Krenke, women of color make up 45 percent -- almost half of the young women in active duty.

Military recruitment numbers have gone down, in general, in the first months of 2005. As a number of media sources have reported, African-American youth, in particular, are staying out of recruitment offices. According to a recent Department of Defense survey, African Americans -- who made up 24 percent of Army recruits in 2000 -- today make up only around 14 percent of the same group. The Army Reserves, which has traditionally seen higher numbers of people of color, has also seen a significant drop.

The overall number of new female recruits has also dropped since the War on Iraq began, but African-American and Latina women still make up around the same percentage of the whole (between 26-29% and 11-12% respectively) as they did in 2002. Meanwhile, the percentage of Asian-Pacific Islander and Native women have grown from 4.2 to 5% and 1.9 to 2.4% respectively).

At the Crossroads

Walidah Imarisha, the editor of AWOL and a board member of the Central Committee on Conscientious Objectors, says she joined the counter-recruitment movement because of her experiences growing up on military bases. She says that women are rarely the focus of counter-recruitment activism but wants to change that.

"The intersection of race and gender is so important," says Imarisha. Usually we talk about race or gender, but not about both.” The issues that young women of color face, she says, are "something we don’t even talk about -- and a challenge for the counter-recruitment and anti-militarism movements."

As the Pentagon is expected to step up its recruitment drive in the coming months, organizers like Imarisha say that recruiters will increasingly target young women -- especially young women of color, in particular.

"In addition to all the promises they make to everyone," Imarisha explains, "recruiters play off young women’s fears of being trapped in the desperate situations that a lot of poor women of color are [often] left in."

Social justice organizers have long identified the lack of options for young people in poor and working-class communities of color. In neighborhoods where schools are under-funded, young men are often faces with two choices. Working in the "underground economy" (and going to prison) or seeking out money for college (and to joining the military). Although it’s rarely discussed, young women in the same neighborhoods have just as few choices.

Aimee Allison, now 35, is a conscientious objector who joined the military when she was 17. As one of six children in a working-class African American family, Allison’s parents were unable to send her to college, even though she was accepted to a number of schools.

At the time, there were constant advertisements on TV about the GI Bill. "When I was 17, $10,000 sounded like so much money," Allison recalls. "That included a sign-on bonus and a loan repayment. I didn't know the details and didn't think to ask." She talked with a recruiter who, like many recruiters today, had an office at her high school. "He knew that I wanted to make something of myself," she says. "He was really encouraging and said, ‘You can do whatever you want with your life, if you join the military. I know you want to be a doctor -- you can get training as a medic.'"

So she joined.

Today, Allison fears that more and more young women of color will be choosing the path she did. To her, this should be no cause for celebration.

"There were a lot of things that happened to me in military training that violated what it means to be a self-respecting woman and a self-respecting African American," Allison says. For instance, the training she went through -- including the songs she had to sing -- was from male-centered frameworks that view "other people" in disrespectful ways, she says. Another part of her training was learning how to follow orders without question; this meant she had to unlearn what her parents had taught her -- that it is wrong to treat people badly. She had to learn to stop expressing her emotions, as crying or hugging were severely punished in boot camp.

Vanessa Huang is an organizer, writer and ethnic studies student at Brown University.

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