Attention! Looking at Blacks in Military

In the hit film “Boyz N the Hood,” a heroic black father passes on this advice to his son, who later passes it on to a friend: There is no place for an African-American in the white man’s army.

In a “Special Rediscover America” advertising supplement in Time magazine last week, author Alex Haley expressed a different view: “The most shining example of what can be done to diminish racism is the U.S. Armed Forces.”

Hmmm. Does the father in “Boyz,” with his Muslim and black nationalist leanings, know something that Haley, the author of the Pulitzer-prize winning “Roots,” doesn’t?

As it happens, the issue of blacks in the Army just popped up in at least three magazines.

The cover story in the Aug. 5 New Republic asks: “How Do They Do It? Why the Military Is the Only Truly Integrated Institution in America.”

The author, Charles Moskos, offers six complex and intertwined reasons:

* Since the bitter days of Vietnam, the Army has become “a radical meritocracy. . . .”

“For many youths from impoverished backgrounds, successful completion of basic training is the first occasion in which they can outshine those coming from privileged backgrounds.”

* The Army is now absolutely committed to equal opportunity and non-discrimination, regardless of race.

* The hierarchy of rank actually breaks down racial animosities.

* The goal of the military promotion board is “to achieve a percentage of minority and female selection not less than the selection rate for all officers being considered.” And that goal, Moskos says, is taken seriously and enforced.

* The Army uses its ample psychological expertise to develop extremely effective race relations programs, from sensitivity courses to extensive monitoring of behavior.

* Blacks in leadership roles within the Army see themselves as the “main transmission belt of the values of discipline and self-improvement of the old black bourgeoisie. . . .”

“In their bootstrap conservatism and rejection of the ideology of victimhood, senior black sergeants and officers differ from an important segment of the black civilian leadership,” says Moskos, a professor of sociology.

A more tangential, and even more thought-provoking, discussion of the topic appears in the August Harper’s. “A Counter-Reality Grows in Harlem,” by James Traub, takes readers to the studios of “The Gary Byrd Show,” the most popular black radio talk show in New York City.

On repeated visits to the show, Traub--who is white--decides that the African-American audience inhabits “a counter-reality, a counter-mythos, with alternative facts and alternative motives.” In this reality, Traub contends, “the underlying emotion dictates the facts.”

And the theories. Among the notions discussed (and, Traub suggests, readily accepted by a growing segment of the black community) are the beliefs of an African studies professor that “blacks are a benign ‘people of the sun,’ while whites are malevolent ‘ice people.’ ”

As his example of how the facts are twisted in the counter-reality, Traub examines the case of a black soldier who was shot a week before the beginning of the Persian Gulf War. Byrd and callers to the show left the impression that the attack had been racially motivated. And that impression didn’t change after an investigation revealed that the shooting was an accident by an unstable man.

Later, when a black vice president of research for the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies came on the show, he was hooted at and ridiculed as an “Uncle Tom” by the audience and other guest speakers for his view that “the military is the most hospitable environment in this country for people of color.”

As evidence that he was lying, an audience member brought up the case of the soldier who had been killed by a racist in Saudi Arabia.

“What is the psychic gulf between blacks and whites, after all, but a vivid reflection of the experiential gulf that lies between them?” Traub asks. “Whites are isolated from black reality as blacks are isolated from white reality.”

In “Boyz,” the father accepts an increasingly common version of black reality, which leads him to preach that the ever powerful “they” secretly support the tragic way young African-Americans are killing themselves off with guns and drugs. He argues for a sort of black separatism.

Traub, Moskos and Haley would each prefer to conquer the racism that threatens to debilitate America.

The Army’s examples--at least as portrayed in these articles--would seem to merit study, even if one doesn’t see the military as an option for young people, regardless of color.

The modern military, according to Haley, shows “that we can achieve some strides if we recognize and define our racial problems--including, in recent years, the unprecedented black racism against whites--and move with persistent leadership to solve them.

“No matter who instigates racism we all suffer.”

Or, as Moskos says:

“The military of the 1970s recognized that its race problem was so critical that it was on the verge of self-destruction. That realization set in motion the steps that have led to today’s relatively positive state of affairs. As racial division seems to be growing in American society at large, we must come to that same realization.”

REQUIRED READING

What is Biosphere 2?

It’s a hermetically sealed array of seven connected, computer-controlled ecosystems containing 3,800 plant and animal species--including, before long, eight Homo sapiens specimens of both genders (and one color).

Depending on whom one asks, it is also either the most important scientific project since man landed on the moon--a prototype community for the colonization of Mars that may well solve many of life’s mysteries--or the slightly lunatic pipe dream of New Age space cadets.

Given the level of media infatuation with the project, it would be hard for anyone not to know the basic facts about this three-acre, 10-story cluster of glassed-in structures in the middle of the Arizona desert. The biosphere is the brainchild of John Allen, a 62-year-old engineer and Harvard MBA. It is funded by over $100 million in private money, much of which was donated by 45-year-old Texas heir Edward P. Bass.

But as Life magazine reporter Jeanne Marie Laskas toured the project and interviewed principal players, she found herself repeatedly asking what seemed like a fairly simple question: “What is this thing for?”

The answers she reports are more annoying than satisfying, which may explain the title of her feature story in the August Life: “Weird Science.”

Laskas is not the first magazine journalist to cast a skeptical eye on Biosphere 2. She is, however, among the few. Any colleague considering the pilgrimage to this supposed scientific oasis would be well advised to read her entertaining exploration first.

The Biosphere project’s public relations machine is unlikely to inform them, for instance, that Allen, who sometimes calls himself Johnny Dolphin, also ran what the Texas press described as a cult-like commune, where he allegedly coerced Bass into funding his projects. Or that a book about communes referred to Allen’s “manipulative shrewdness.” Or that the Biosphere people have a tendency to threaten those who criticize them with litigation.

The many supporters of Biosphere have received, and presumably will continue to receive, a sympathetic audience from the press. But Laskas suggests that there is another side to this media-genic project.

As one University of Arizona academic told Laskas, “The whole thing gives me the creeps.”