by Earl Ofari Hutchinson
The Vets that gave a thumbs up on honesty to Clint Eastwood's sprawling battlefield epic, Flags of Our Fathers at a private screening weren't being totally honest themselves. They almost certainly know that white Marines and GI's weren't the only ones that fought, died, supplied ammo, and provisions, and carried the dead and wounded from the Iwo Jima killing fields.
Nearly a thousand African-Americans took part in the battle and hundreds more played vital support roles. Yet in the sprawling two-hour plus film, no black combatant is seen. This continues the insulting and infuriating pattern in books, films, and TV movies in which the monumental contributions that black men and women made to the fighting in the Pacific and Europe have downplayed, ignored, or deliberately whitewashed.The invisibility of black soldiers in Flags of Our Fathers, and indeed, the legions of other bio-pic movies on World War II is no surprise to the many black vets that know the true story of the war. They have taken every opportunity they've gotten to protest the sanitizing.
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I often hear a comment (on- and off-line) that goes more or less like this - why must you inject race into everything? I suppose I see things differently. In this case, I have to ask why my relatives were left out of popular depictions of historical events. I had uncles who fought in the Pacific, and my grandfather was a sharpshooter in France. My grandfather in particular was highly decorated, but like many of his generation, he refused to talk about the war. He also refused to talk about his work in the civil rights movement - at least to me. I saw his medals by accident one day, when they fell out of a drawer and the cigar box popped open. I saw five or six before he closed the box up again.
Is that injecting race? I'm asking about my grandfather and my uncles, not abstract concepts. They were there - either them or men they knew. Men I knew in fact, men who held church, taught me stuff, laughed, joked, prayed, marched at home and abroad, ate too much when times were good, drank too much when times were bad, sang, except Granddaddy, who did not drink. This is my community, my kith and kin, my family.
So I speak up, when I see something to speak up about. I inject race, or my family, or myself, or whatever the hell I want. My own grandfather hid behind enemy lines and shot Nazis, and my uncles fought off bombers and fighters in the Pacific. I think I can summon the courage to speak up on their behalf.