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Melissa Harris-Perry: This is The Takeaway. I'm Melissa Harris-Perry, and we so appreciate you spending some of your Memorial Day with us. To start things off, we wanted to hear about the veterans you're remembering today.

Deborah: My name is Deborah. I'm calling from St. Cloud, Florida. My dad, he was in Vietnam. He was there from the '50s through the '60s, and then Sam, my grandmother's brother was in World War II. He did not survive. I have several other family members who were in the wars of the 1900s.

Mac: My name is Mac calling from Downingtown, Pennsylvania. On this Memorial Day, and every Memorial Day, I will be thinking of PFC Don Lucas, PFC Richard Zimerman, Lance Corporal Ernie [unintelligible 00:00:50], Lance Corporal Barry [unintelligible 00:00:52], and PFC James [unintelligible 00:00:54] of Company C First Battalion Fifth Marines, all members of my platoon who were killed in action in Vietnam in 1969. And of PFC Jimmy FIPs Company B First Engineer Battalion attached to Charlie Company was awarded the medal of honor posthumously for saving three other Marines at the cost of his own life.

Karma: Karma, Brooklyn, New York. I will be thinking of my father and mother this Memorial Day. My father Lewis Martel served in the army in World War II. He was behind enemy lines, taken prisoner in Germany, and escaped, not before helping many, many people. He was a medic. My mother Francesca Martel served as a WAC in World War II, the Women's Army Corps in Palm Springs. She was a pioneer of her time.

Tom: Hi, it's Tom from Glendale. This Memorial Day weekend, I'll remember when I walked along the walkway next to the Vietnam Memorial Wall, took me three visits to actually take the walk. The first two, I was so depressed as a Vietnam veteran that I couldn't get my head together to actually walk along and view the names. These were people I served with, people I went to college with, people I knew, and people who did not come home.

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Melissa Harris-Perry: As always, thank you so much for calling and sharing with us. We join you in paying tribute to these service members.

Richard Brookshire: My name is Richard Brookshire and I'm the co-founder of the Black Veterans Project.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Now, Richard Brookshire is a former infantry combat medic and a US Army veteran who served in Afghanistan.

Richard Brookshire: I think for me, as a soldier, a Black soldier, a queer soldier, I have a complicated relationship with my military service, but at the same time, I love this country and I have a deep admiration for many of the individuals who've come before me and served on behalf of this American project.

Melissa Harris-Perry: We wanted to start this Memorial Day by talking about service members who've been marginalized, excluded, and sometimes even erased by our history.

Black Americans have served in every military conflict in the United States. Today, as we honor the contributions of the fallen, we also wanted to take a moment to remember the complicated legacy that many of these African American soldiers face.

Richard Brookshire: It's a bit of a misnomer to think that you go into the military and suddenly race doesn't matter. The military's own robust institution, once segregated, very much leaned on conscription for the better part of its existence, had purposefully locked Black veterans out of many, many roles. Even now, today, there's just a confluence of different ways that race interplays in the military. You have everything from Confederate name bases that are this move to get them renamed to very disturbing disparities under the military's justice system, which is its own separate and unequal justice system. You have a confluence of bad paper discharges.

This history that goes all the way back to when Black Americans first started serving in the military where they were stripped of their benefits. It's a continuation of that through something called bad paper discharges. Race is just a matter of American life, unfortunately, it doesn't disappear when you move into the military, and a lot of Marines go by the name dark green because there's this saying that when you put the military uniform on, everybody's green, and Marines often say, "No, we're dark green. Our color's still here and it's certainly at play."

Melissa Harris-Perry: How long have there been Black veterans?

Richard Brookshire: There's always been Black vets. Black vets have been part of the maintenance of this American democratic project since the very beginning, since the revolutionary war. Actually, it's funny. My mom just finished her master's degree at Xavier studying African American religions. Her paper was about Haitian soldiers who were sent to Savannah, this consequential battle during the revolutionary war to fight in the American revolution. Many, many African Americans also fought as well. Been there since the beginning. I think the civil war would not have been won if not for the formerly enslaved who served. I would say every single American conflict has leaned on Black military service.

We've always been here.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Given that there have always been Black veterans in US armed forces as long as there's been the US and even prior, at least one conversation that occurs around multiple identities, so around gender, women have full access to all aspects of service for Black folks, for Japanese American service members, for queer service members, sometimes even for service members whose own family members are undocumented. Sometimes the conversation is about citizenship. That military service is the cost that you pay to help ensure that the totality of the community is seen and recognized as full members of the community.

Can you talk to me a bit about how maybe that promise has not been fulfilled for Black veterans relative to the full possibilities of citizenship?

Richar Brookshire: I always think back to WB DeVos who spoke of the importance of military service as a pathway to full citizenship. One couldn't deny you full access to the vote or full equality because you shed blood on behalf of the country. We knew that at the part of World War I when Black Vets returned predominantly to the south, many who were lynched. The red summer is something that if people aren't familiar with they should look up.

This past January, the Department of Defense actually apologized because the largest murder trial in American history was actually centered around a group of black Veterans, a hundred some odd of them, who when a white mob essentially accosted a few members and were pretty much getting ready to lynch some of them fought back and killed a few white men down in Texas, and the military threw about a hundred of them in prison, the majority of which for life, and executed a good number as well. They formally apologized just this past January for how they treated those men.

That goes all the way to World War II, that same height of the Jim Crow era, but the same kind of conversation about, hey, we're going to go and serve, and we should be able to get full access to the benefits that we deserve and to the full equal citizenship. You have a gentleman like Isaac Woodard who comes back literally on the bus ride home from being deployed, is blinded in a racist act because he had his uniform on and dared to ask if he could use the restroom. World War II is actually probably the most important to me because you had a social welfare policy that many people join if not conscripted because of economic mobility opportunities in the military.

Then, you had a huge set of social welfare programs that were laid out post World War II, named the GI Bill, because of redlining, racial discrimination, higher education, and so on and so forth, of the 900,000 African Americans who served, less than 5% actually got full access to their GI Bill. Access by white soldiers to the GI Bill afforded white men the ability to go to school, the ability to purchase homes. You had the build-out of the American middle class built upon this social welfare policy that was born out of military service that Black Americans were denied, and the compounding effects of that generationally are felt in the preceding decades.

When you look at inner-city blight, massive disinvestment, white flight, and so on and so forth, the GI Bill in that denial certainly played a role. You fast forward to Vietnam when you have urban blight run amok, you have black folks, especially at the outset of the war, dying at the highest rates on the front line, being conscripted coming back to absolutely no mechanisms of real support. Then, you have this evolution because Vietnam was the first fully integrated war. You had bad paper discharges being used exponentially. I think Black veterans accounted for I believe more than half of some of the bad paper discharges depending on the year. That has continued today.

You have Black folks that are overrepresented in service-oriented roles. Black folk are overrepresented in the military, often join because of a lack of economic opportunity and look for the things that all Americans want, which is healthcare, job training, education, healthcare. I could go on and on, but I think that historical perspectives for folks are often missing. I think part of the desire of my project is to make that more salient for folks so they can understand the true history and legacy. Despite all of those things, Black folk have excelled in the military and overcome insurmountable odds in the military, and continue to serve at very, very high rates.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd on Memorial Day in 2020. I'm wondering about the ways that that made the day perhaps even more complex, or if in part as you point out, every day is a Memorial Day given the work that you do. Maybe, in that sense, it felt like it was consistent with that back and forth, I wonder.

Richard Brookshire: Well, I mean, I think to start, there are many ways to serve this country, military service is all but one. I think, obviously, we have this regard for those who don the uniform and go off to fight wars. As I've gotten older, I think I've gotten to a more complicated, I guess, set of analyses about what it means to serve and what the military is and how it's used, and how sometimes politicians can use it as a prop. I think when it came to the murder of George Floyd, I'd never been one to celebrate Memorial Day, Memorial Day was basically Gay Pride weekend, I'm a gay man, so it's Atlanta Gay Pride.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Right because it's just [unintelligible 00:11:20]. [laughs]

Richard Brookshire: Black gay men turning Memorial Day into their biggest celebratory day has nothing to do with honoring the military, and I'm okay with that. At the end of the day, I think, when you're marginalized in this country to the degree to which many Black queer people are, this deference to military service sometimes doesn't exist. I think even more so now because of things like Twitter and social media and our vantage point into what the machine is, I think a lot of people are just looking at the military as a job. It's a job that you go to, and you know you have to have certain considerations.

I'm not quite sure that most Americans, at least the ones that I interface with, really look at it with the same regard that perhaps generations past have looked at military service. I certainly think there are certain people that look to veterans and honor their service, but I think most Americans are indifferent or struggling in their own way, and don't necessarily hold the military as some big bright beacon of hope, especially after the longest war in American history and this wide chasm between the civilian and military because less than 1% of Americans actually serve now, which is so vastly different from what has been in the past, so complicated question.

I don't I don't necessarily know if it changed my view of it because I don't think I ever had a view of Memorial Day as like some significant holiday, just based on who I am and how I present in the world.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Let's take a quick break. More with Richard Brookshire of the Black Veterans Project in just a moment. It's Memorial Day on The Takeaway.

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Melissa Harris-Perry: It's Memorial Day here on The Takeaway, and I've been talking with Richard Brookshire, the co-founder of the Black Veterans Project, an organization that advocates for the needs of Black veterans. Just a note, this next part of the conversation touches on some of Richard's personal mental health struggles and a suicide attempt.

Richard Brookshire: I started this project about three and a half years ago. I'm a former army combat medic. I served for seven years, went to Afghanistan, came back, and I think on paper to most people, I made a seamless transition. I graduated from an Ivy League school, I landed a great job in city government in New York. It was also at the rot, the start of the rise of Trump. There was a very consequential thing that had happened in the fall of that year right around the time of his election. There was a white man who'd come to New York with the explicit purpose of killing a Black person, which we know is pretty much commonplace now, and that was the first time I had experienced something like that.

It just so happened that the individual was someone who'd been in the same unit as me in Germany, it's not someone that I ever interacted with, but I was on a pretty small base in Germany, so there's only a few thousand soldiers there. We went to the same place for basic training around the same time, we deployed to Afghanistan at the same time, and we got out around the same time and he went on one path, I went on another. He became a neo-Nazi and I became a racial justice advocate.

That was a real turning point for me, but it also thrust me into a complete spiral I think that many vets can relate to because I found myself having an experience that so many people couldn't understand, like coming home, being away from my own life for the better part of four or five years, coming back having missed so much. I'm trying to figure out how to play catch up and not having necessarily been mentored, I think, in some respects, the way that I wish I could have been, but I made the best of it, but I found myself spiraling into a really deep depression.

Unfortunately, it left me quitting my job, I almost ended up homeless if it wasn't for my mom packing up two suitcases and moving to a tiny one-bedroom apartment in the middle of Brooklyn to help rehabilitate me after I had a suicide attempt. After my suicide attempt, actually, in the psych ward itself, we didn't have phones and computers or any of that, so I wasn't inundated all the time. My mom was just dropping off books that I hadn't read that had been sitting in my room. One of them was a book called When Affirmative Action Was White by Ira Katznelson, and the book changed my life. There's a chapter about the GI Bill, and it planted a seed for me because I couldn't wait to get out the army.

As a Black gay man, I couldn't wait to run as far away from the military as possible. I found myself feeling quite alienated, and after I got off the psych ward, I'd went to a job training program that the city had been putting on. There, I saw that the majority of the people in the room who were unemployed veterans were Black. That struck me, and many of them said that they were either experiencing homelessness or had experienced incarceration, and being a millennial, I started to Google. I couldn't find a lot of storytelling about the Black experience in the military at the time. This is only three and a half years ago.

I essentially got with two naval academy grads that I'd gone to graduate school with and said, "Hey, there's something here, there's something worth looking at, there's a project that needs to happen. How do we tell our story, but also tie it to this larger legacy that we're a part of?" I spent the better part of the summer trying to aggregate as much research as I possibly could. Then, I had a chance opportunity to meet someone by the name of Michael Wishnie, who runs a veteran's legal clinic at Yale. He had been working for the last several decades on issues relating to veterans, but specifically Black vets. I guess the big thing that was missing was the disparities in disability allocation.

What I mean by that is, if you're a veteran and you get injured, or lose a limb, you have PTSD, you experience all level of stuff, you can put in for a claim. In that claim, you can get up to 100% disability, and that's thousands and thousands of dollars that you receive every month. I was really curious with the racial disparities and the allocation of those benefits were. We spent the better part of the year compiling these FOIA requests and working with students and then delivered the largest race-based data query in the history of Department of Veterans Affairs to look at the last 20 years of disparities with respect to disability compensation.

I think the most significant thing that I learned was that over the course of about four and a half years, the VA had known that Black vets were up to 29% less likely to get disability for PTSD, and they essentially did nothing about it. We have email correspondence that speaks to it and all sorts of things. That, and we also were able to prove that there's a statistically significant difference in not only the rate of denials suffered by Black vets but also if they do get disability, the rate of disability that they actually get, so they're getting lower than their white counterparts for the same ailments.

The VA actually has data that goes back all the way to the founding of the Veterans Administration or the Veterans Bureau in World War I, so we're wanting to look at all the data that they have.

Melissa Harris-Perry: The current Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin, is the first Black person to hold this particular role. Are you optimistic about seeing progress around issues of racial equity within the military for veterans under Secretary Austin?

Richard Brookshire: I've been asked this question before. I think I always look at we've had a first Black commander in chief, and arguably higher ranking than the secretary. We didn't have the kind of reckoning that we, I think, deserve as a country, that I'm not quite sure that this one man can set a new path, though I do think that what he's attempting to do will be beneficial. It's a large shift for the Department of Defense. It's not an easy task, so I think it'd be unfair to say that things are going to change. I'd rather be somewhat pessimistic and be pleasantly surprised than be optimistic and let down my guard for lack of a better phrase in the way in which we're being very aggressive with our advocacy.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Richard Brookshire, co-founder of the Black Veterans Project, it's been such a pleasure. Thank you for joining us.

Richard Brookshire: Thank you. I appreciate it.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Now, The Takeaway reached out to the Department of Veterans Affairs for comment on some of the racial disparities and benefit approvals that Richard Brookshire discussed with us. In response, a VA spokesperson sent a statement saying, "VA is dedicated to ensuring that all veterans receive fair decisions based on their military service and disabilities." We also wanted to note that if you or someone you know is in need of help, call the National Helpline at 1-800 800-662-help. That's 1-800-662-4357, or you can call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 800-273-8255. Both are available 24/7.

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