Taking the Cake

According to a recent Gallup Poll, 78 percent of white Americans supported invading Iraq, but only 29 percent of blacks. One reason for such a great disparity might be that while blacks represent 12 percent of the population, they make up at least 25 percent of the Army. Those whom the war touches most deeply--particularly the relatives of servicemen--tend to be deeply uneasy about this war. (It would be interesting to break down the antiwar sentiment among whites: a good portion will no doubt be "the usual liberals," but I suspect that a surprising number of them will be Gulf War and Vietnam vets, as well as family of servicemen and -women.)

Another reason for the disparity is probably economics. With an unemployment rate double that of whites--a little more than 10 percent--African-Americans are first to feel our massive, war-inspired budget cuts. There is concern, too, that almost 5 percent of all black men are in prison or jail, a sad overrepresentation among the nation's inmates, whose overall population recently rose to surpass 2 million. While some think that this rate of incarceration--the highest in the world by far--is a good thing, most blacks see it as the product of failures in the infrastructure serving minorities, particularly public schools, which have been resegregating over the past decade at an alarming rate.

In addition, many black churches and social organizations are very mindful of Martin Luther King's concern in his much-cited "Beyond Vietnam" speech: that we were "taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them 8,000 miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem. So we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools."

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