Black antiwar critics rejected Vietnam from the position of its targets

Evidence

A historian of the antiwar movement has written, “While whites marched under banners proclaiming, ‘We are not a nation of killers,’ black Americans linked the killings in Vietnam to their own experiences. On January 3, 1966, civil rights worker Samuel Younge, a member of the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), was shot and killed in Alabama when he tried to use a whites-only rest room, and SNCC’s statement called his murder ‘no different from the murder of the people of Vietnam… . In each case, the U.S. government bears a great part of the responsibility for these deaths.’” The war was rejected by many black Americans, who regarded it as “a white man’s war on colored people,” but the position that they adopted was not that of an agent who wished to disown his action. Rather, the position from which they recognized and rejected that violence both in Vietnam and at home was that of being its targets. — Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, 636

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes the reader’s core interest: the moral position of the target versus the agent of lethal surveillance.