Beyond Countering Recruitment: Teaching Youth to Imagine a Different Future

Military recruitment doesn’t just happen at the Times’ Square Recruiting Station, or at community recruiting centers like the one recently targeted by antiwar activists in Berkeley. Sure, those storefronts sit in strip malls decorated with fancy posters offering money and education and hope to attract foot traffic. But any decent recruiter will tell you that their success is in their ability to build relationships and offer a vision for a young person’s future. I should know. That’s how I ended up serving six years in the U.S. Army.

Ten Excellent Reasons Not to Join the Army (New Press, 2006)

I desperately wanted out of my small-minded hometown of Antioch, California, and the military recruiter on my high school campus promised me an escape hatch. The family that my white mother and African American father created was based on the belief that the hard work and democratic values of 1960s activists made equality my birthright.

But my day-to-day experience was full of evidence that racism was alive and well. High school classmates would chant the n-word when our team played its biggest rival the next town over. Slurs against gay people were so accepted that teachers used them without thought. And after winning a local Junior Miss competition, a first for a black contestant, I was excluded from the local news and town parade. When I brought my Ivy League college acceptance letter into the career center, a counselor suggested that I got in because of my race. So I rushed to sign up for the Army Reserves, in part because it was the only place I knew of that promised I wouldn’t be judged or limited by my race or gender.