Questioning Freedom

Chef: You ever heard of the Emancipation Proclamation?
General: I don't listen to hip-hop!

Today's discussion had me remember the above image from South Park.  In this scene black soldiers were to be used as "human shields" to protect the white troops from getting shot. While this is fictional, I couldn't but help think of black servicemen questioning their role in the Korean War.

When you are denied freedoms at home, how can you fight for "freedom" somewhere else? This seems logical doesn't it? Yet, to question is to be labeled a communist sympathizer. If blacks are in the U.S.  and they questioned they could be outright killed. Its a no win situation. The Korean War made this even more obvious in the racism that was evident in the army. The Red Cross labeled blood based on race. MacArthur did nothing to stop the racism which divided the army. Blacks were often given jobs which were beneath their training and intelligence.

The morale of blacks in the army sunk. Rightfully so. To be segregated in your home state, then to be desegregated in the army, is giving blacks a sense of freedom. This sense of freedom is destroyed the moment a black veteran returns to the America. Black veterans who have risked their lives don't want to give up their freedom. Why should they? Because their skin isn't white? Because they are potentially descended from  slaves? Because they have faced death, rape, being robbed? This is nothing new to blacks, especially during the 1950s Jim Crow laws.

I would also like to point out that in the film The Steel Helmet, the North Korean officer asks the black medic how can he fight for the whites, when he faces such racism at home and in the army. He then goes on to ask the Japanese American how he too can fight for the whites despite how the whites of America treated his people during WWII, specifically putting them in internment camps.

It is questions like these which really raises the question: Is America fighting for freedom?