In School Brown Boys Wear Green

I was inspired to write this piece because I wanted to explore how society limits opportunities for low-income minorities at such a young age. This is a reality that hits close to home.

I don’t want to go to college. My cousin’s words sinking to the bottom of my stomach. I want to go to war. Standing next to him in the cramped kitchen of our grandparents’ apartment as we sipped chicha morada in small wineglasses, I calculated how many years left until he turned eighteen. Two. Two years and one month. In two years, where would I be? College, most likely. Both my parents had master’s degrees and had sent me to a prestigious liberal arts public high school in New York City so that I could go on the same track. My cousin, however, like many men in our family, will be joining the military. His high school offers a Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (JROTC) program.

There are already two factors in my cousin Jose Alexander’s life, besides his genuine, or seemingly genuine, desire to join the military, that have set him on that path. The first has to do with his economic background: As a low-income student attending a poorly resourced public school, he receives little to no support to aid his academic success. As a result, he has had a difficult time enjoying school and learning. This is one example of a systemic issue that many low-income students face because the American school system does not have enough resources and funds. This only discourages students.

The second factor is his racial background; he is Afro-Latino. Although there is nothing about his being a person of color that turned him toward the military and away from college, it is the policing and criminalization of young black and brown boys that steers them toward the military track. The JROTC program was originally created to promote discipline, leadership, and responsibility, which, off the bat, may not sound like it’s targeting minority youth. However, the stated objective to have a positive impact on “at- risk youth,” I contend, is code for its being aimed at minority students.

My cousin, as a young, working-class man of color, is an example of the “at- risk youth” that the JROTC program targets. When I asked Jose over our dinner of home-cooked ceviche and papa a la huancaina, two classic Peruvian dishes, why he chose to participate in the JROTC program, he responded: “I used to get into trouble a lot and skip classes and stuff like that, but JROTC helped me get out of that habit and got me on the right track to achieving my goal.” Jose later on in the evening commented that students not in the program “look at us differently, as does soci ety, when we wear the uniform . . . We get a lot more respect.” I understand that the appeal for students being criminalized by schools and the authorities is that the process of being “disci plined” will earn them respect from these same institutions. How ever, as someone who has witnessed and written about the criminalization of young black and Latino men, I remain critical of the promotion of discipline as a supposed remedy for students that the JROTC program deems to be at- risk, and I suspect that it is merely another form of criminalization of minority youth.

The first thought that popped into my head after I read the mission statement was why target minority students? When I looked at which schools host a JROTC program, there was a clear pattern to who they were targeting: schools with largely low income students of color. I began to wonder about the difference of opportunities that were given to students in my school versus my cousin’s. My school did not have a JROTC program. The difference is that my school, although a public school, had attracted many affluent families that provide funding through the PTA

The reason this matters is that if a school decides not to offer the JROTC program, the government reduces the school’s funding. My school, because of the PTA funding, does not need to rely as much on government funding, and as a result has the luxury to reject the JROTC program. In other words, the threat of reducing funding is a cunning way to railroad young men, mainly young men of color, into these “disciplinary” programs.

We need to do better, as a society, to pressure the government to give more funding to public schools so they can remain independent of the JROTC program and provide a wider range of opportunities for our students. The military often only reproduces poverty, depression, and trauma. There needs to be an end to this cycle, and more lower-income students of color need to be given the support and opportunity to pursue careers other than in the military.

As the night drew on, our dinner plates wiped clean and the traditional dessert of café with panettone served, my cousin showed off his brand-new uniform with his name tag on the front: “Jose Aguilar.” His name, yet another reminder of the many Latino names that I’ve seen on the front of military uniforms, the face of an optimistic young brown boy ready to fight for his country.