OPINION: The Taliban may have taken Kabul, but the White Taliban here in the U.S. is at war against democracy and coming for Black folks’ ballots. And that is an outrage.
President Joe Biden has withdrawn the last of the U.S. troops from Afghanistan, ending a senseless, 20-year war that should not have been waged, and the reasons why America was there in the first place is anyone’s guess. The chaotic scenes of U.S. retreat from the capital city of Kabul — as American personnel and their Afghan helpers are airlifted out of that country as quickly as the Taliban has taken it over — remind some people of the fall of Saigon, when People’s Army of Vietnam, also known as the Viet Cong, took control of South Vietnam.
The parallels between America’s entanglements in Vietnam and Afghanistan are clear, especially as far as Black people are concerned. While the war in Vietnam was promoted during the Cold War era as a fight for democracy and against Communism, that war was more about war profiteering than extending rights to Brown people thousands of miles away. Millions of Vietnamese and 58,220 American soldiers lost their lives, and for what?
Muhammad Ali jeopardized his freedom and livelihood when he refused to go to Vietnam on religious grounds, because he could not understand why he should go shoot poor, dark-skinned people who never called him n****r and never lynched him.
People were connecting dots between the war in Vietnam and civil rights and poverty at home. The war machine undermined President Lyndon Johnson’s war on poverty. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke out against that war, and many in the civil rights community turned their backs on him for it. King broke his silence, calling Vietnam “a white man’s war, a Black man’s fight.”
“We were taking the Black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem,” Dr. King said, noting that Black and white boys that could not attend school together were killing and dying for America in Vietnam. And he saw the Vietnam war as “an enemy of the poor,” a war that devastated the hopes of poor people and sent the poor to fight.
“It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor — both Black and white — through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings,” King added. “Then came the buildup in Vietnam, and I watched this program broken and eviscerated, as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war, and I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube.”
Source: ‘White man’s war, Black man’s fight’: Black soldiers paid heavy price in Afghanistan
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