US military diversity was deployed to legitimate global intervention

Evidence

Khaled became a regular participant at AAPF’s annual social justice writers retreat, where he drew connections between the new frontier of American imperialism abroad and domestic campaigns of so-called counterterrorism and long-standing systems of racism against Black people and sexism against women. … Those retreats offered freestyle intellectual engagement, and Khaled’s organic observations from those informal debates and observations would later appear in his books and articles. … “Muslims are being racially constructed as terrorists,” he observed during one of our retreats, noting how “the War on Terror was a global imperial project.” These discussions often featured ideas that would later form the thesis of his subsequent publications, including his critically acclaimed first book, American Islamophobia: Understanding the Roots and Rise of Fear. — Khaled A. Beydoun, The New Crusades_ Islamophobia and the…, 22 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Race scholar Nikhil Pal Singh argues that “frontier wars, the wars of the early U.S. empire, and the twentieth century’s world wars all illuminated affinities between war making and race making, activating or reaffirming distinctions between friend and enemy along an internal racial border.” Perhaps the most significant example of this process in the twentieth century involved the treatment of Japanese Americans after the attack on Pearl Harbor. More than 100,000 people of Japanese descent were rounded up and put into detention camps. Young and old were incarcerated simply for having a Japanese ancestor and forced into harsh conditions in makeshift camps, often without cooking or even plumbing facilities. Of those incarcerated, nearly three-quarters were US citizens. — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 536 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Post-Cold War US empire rebranded military force as benevolent multicultural intervention — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 403; Representing military diversity legitimized endless US intervention worldwide; US military diversity itself served as imperial branding after the Gulf War — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 416 (+7 more)

Broader Connections

• US imperialism abroad and domestic counterterrorism form one interconnected racial system #complicates (0.78) — Khaled A. Beydoun, The New Crusades_ Islamophobia and the…, 22
• US wars abroad activate racial borders that target domestic minorities #complicates (0.75) — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 536