What Dreams of Canada Tell Us About Race in America | History News...
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1/19/20
What Dreams of Canada Tell Us About Race in
America
tags: Vietnam, Canada, Race, Draft, Underground Railroad
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by April Rosenblum
April Rosenblum writes about race, class, Jewish identity and movementbuilding. She is at work on a microhistory of Black/Jewish relations. Her essays
have appeared in The Washington Post, Class Lives: Stories from Across Our
Economic Divide, The International Encyclopedia of Revolution and Protest, Righteous
Indignation: A Jewish Call for Justice, Bridges and Afn Shvel. Twitter:
@homeandfreedom
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A few days into the new year, Americans awoke to
news that the U.S. had assassinated Iranian General
Qasem Soleimani. Fears of military conflict with
Iran dawned on thousands, search engine hits for
“World War 3” soared, and both Iranians and
their loved ones in America braced for what might
be next.
https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/174074
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Although U.S. military personnel overseas were the
ones closer to harm’s way, many young people at
home in the U.S. immediately wondered if there
could be a draft. By 8 a.m. on January 3rd, the
Selective Service, which maintains records of those
registered for military draft in case of war, was
reporting website overload. On social media, users
posted memes about leaving for Canada, imagining
spontaneous road trips north and draft-safe igloos.
Others posted more poignant messages, like the
mother of an 18-year-old who sat her son down for
“the talk” about moving north if the draft became
real. Why does Canada spring to mind so quickly
when Americans fear war?
Canada’s unique role in the American imagination
comes in part from its very real history as a source of
refuge. During slavery, enslaved Africans
sang songs with encoded messages of resistance:
Follow the north star to freedom, in Canada. That
was precisely what thousands of enslaved
people did, founding Canada’s largest early Black
community.
One hundred years after slavery’s official end, a new
generation of Americans sought refuge in Canada.
Their goal was to escape participation in the
Vietnam War and they couldn’t help but see
themselves as a modern-day version of that
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underground railroad, writes historian Wendell
Adjetey. What resulted over the next decade was a
massive, highly organized project to resist the war by
draining the U.S. military of its human power.
Roughly 50,000 men are estimated to have made it
out of the draft’s crosshairs by fleeing to Canada.
Female activists, although exempt from the draft,
approached their political role with equal
seriousness, sometimes posing as partners of male
resisters to help them cross the border without
arousing suspicion. Volunteers in both countries
threw themselves into the work of helping young
people get to Canada: staffing hotlines, counseling
youth about their options if drafted and putting
them in touch with people and resources to make
the journey to Canada go smoothly. Canadians put
pressure on their government, staging clever
border actions to demand immigration officials
welcome a larger number of resisters.
But when it came to the Underground Railroad
analogy, there was one problem. At a time when
American casualties in Vietnam
were disproportionately African American, most of
those who successfully made it to Canada were
white. Other racialized groups among the resisters in
Canada are scarcely discussed in sources on the
period.
The experience of Black resisters in Canada was
fraught. While attempting to cross the border, they
faced scrutiny that white resisters did not. For those
who made it in to Canada, adapting to their new
country was difficult and blending in was
impossible. Local demographics, art and culture felt
so white that resister Eusi Ndugu compared arriving
in Canada to “jumping into a pitcher of buttermilk…
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There’s a race problem here, just like in the
Northern cities of the U.S.” Although Canadians
were polite, Black resisters could sense a “subtle
anti-Black bias” – not just among locals, but among
white resisters, as well.
To combat their alienation, Black resisters took
matters into their own hands. In 1970, a small group
of them founded BRO, the Black Refugee
Organization. BRO members helped newer arrivals
meet their needs and worked out a plan to match
African-American resisters with local Black
Canadian families - which involved bridging cultural
gaps with a now predominantly Caribbean
community. Yet very few Black resisters ultimately
remained in Canada. BRO members soon urged
Black resisters still in America to “stay there if it is at
all possible – do what you can to resist there.”
The experience of white resisters was worlds apart.
For many, Canada became a new home; a place to
reinvent themselves among like-minded peers and
create lives of meaning. Canadians welcomed them
warmly; even government officials later called the
influx of war resister immigrants “the largest, besteducated group this country ever received.” When a
1977 amnesty allowed draft evaders to return home
without punishment, thousands chose to stay in
Canada.
Resisters of all races went to Canada because they
were worried for themselves – but also because of
their horror at what was happening to Vietnamese
civilians. For a generation whose political awakening
had begun with Civil Rights, it was difficult not to
see bombing and napalming brown-skinned
Vietnamese civilians as a racist war. Many early
anti-war activists had learned their tactics of non2/1/2020, 11:21 PM
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violent civil disobedience from Civil Rights work.
The young Black activists of the Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee led the way in making
this connection between war and racism explicit. Dr.
Martin Luther King, Jr. soon followed, gradually
making his opposition to the war more visible in his
Civil Rights work.
The desperation that many young people felt about
stopping the war was summed up by the words of
22-year-old Civil Rights activist Mario Savio. Three
months before the deployment of U.S. combat
troops to Vietnam, the young ItalianAmerican cried out to student protesters, “There's a
time when the operation of the machine becomes so
odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t…
even passively take part. And you've got to put your
bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels…and
you've got to make it stop.”
For a decade during the Vietnam war, young
Americans tried every means they could think of to
stop that machine. They sabotaged it
by destroying draft records, stood in its way by
blockading the trains that moved troops, and made
it difficult for napalm manufacturers and recruiters
to show their faces in public. By going to Canada,
thousands attempted to remove themselves from the
machine’s gears entirely. Yet none of them could
escape the way that, in the end, racism shaped their
available options.
Leaving America surely saved some resisters’ lives.
But the machine they fought is still at work. It is held
together by the message that some lives –at home
and abroad –count as less human than others. A
new generation will now face the question of how to
dismantle it.
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klmanjaro • 12 days ago • edited
and the beat goes on...I, for one being a man of color am definitely
retiring in Panama. I truly don't beleive there will ever be peace
between the races as long as the white man controls the society, It's
almost an inherit trait to discriminate against people of color;so sad.and
It has Not changed since the dawning of time. Vietnam is not even the
tip of the iceberg as far as atrocities committed against blacks in this
country. Blacks were put in a pit and had boiling water poured on them
in an experiment to see how fast their skin would peel off, injected with
the syphilis virus and refused treatment until they died. Black women
were given vaginal surgeries without anesthesia suffering
unmentionable and excruciating pain; had healthy limbs amputated so
white students could practice the procedure. These despicable acts are
not even the tip of the iceberg and they call us savages.
1
• Reply • Share ›
walstir • 2 days ago
https://www.historynet.com/...
"Canada is widely portrayed as a haven for Americans who deserted or
wanted to escape the draft during the Vietnam War. Although there are
no definitive numbers, approximately 60,000 fled the United States for
Canada, according Fred Gaffen, who was a military historian at the
Canadian War Museum. However, about 30,000 Canadians joined
American forces during the same period, with approximately 12,000
serving in Southeast Asia, Gaffen estimated."
At the time, the U.S. population was 10 times larger than the Canadian
population; so 12,000 Canadian volunteers serving in Southeast Asia in
the U.S. military would be equivalent to 120,000 volunteers adjusted for
population size - double the 60,000 Americans who fled to Canada.
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