Colin Powell Is Not My Hero

By 

Nkosinathi Sibanda... 

Forwarded by Soboyejo Alaba Awosika-Coker

Something is wrong with this picture: a black man in the Republican Party who is hugely supported and even loved by black people, even those who are not members of the party and who have come to despise its policies and programs.

Why should an individual's color make him my hero? Why should the fact that a politician is black prevent all constructive criticism of his role and position? I'm writing not of Alan Keyes, nor of J.C. Watts - whose support in the black community is marginal if not absent - but instead of the only black face in the Republican Party who draws enormous audiences and widespread support from the black community: General Colin Powell, recently confirmed as Secretary of State in the administration of President George W. Bush.

When my friends and I talked about Powell, one argued that blacks regard Powell as a pioneering hero because he is the first non-European to rise to such a position. "A hero?" another friend countered. "Where's the heroism in being the first person of non-European descent to plot the murder of thousands of non-whites within the bowels of the Pentagon?"

That gets to the heart of it. Blacks mainly support Powell because he is black; but Powell's allegiances are not primarily to black people. Instead, he owes his career and values to an American institution that has not historically promoted the rights of people of color: the US military.

Success in the military demands both sheer merit and the ability to become part of a system, which you first have to understand, then support and protect. And this partly racialized system looks at people of color as sources of cheap labor, or worse: as the enemy. Can someone working for the indirect maintenance and perpetuation of such a system be deemed heroic before the very people at the receiving end of a passionately conservative, or is it compassionately conservative, America?

So what do we call a black person who has excelled in such an environment, and could easily be the next president of the whole system? A hero? A hero is a role model for children. Should we raise ours to become like General Colin Powell?

A closer look at Powell's military history shows some interesting contradictions - Powell was implicated in the cover-up of the 1968 My Lai village massacre; in the late 80s he was caught up in the illegal arms for hostages deal for which his boss, Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger, was pardoned by George Bush the elder; in the early 90s, under Powell's strategic command, US forces bulldozed Iraqi draftees into mass graves, bombed retreating forces on "the highway of death" and set oil refineries on fire.

On the behalf of those who have lost homes in the floods of Mozambique, those struggling with heroin addiction in Roxbury, Boston, those who are victims of internecine fighting in developing countries: I reject the idea that Gen. Powell belongs in that great tradition of black heroes who stood for something and did not fall for anything. Powell is a good soldier who rose through the ranks, whose obedience and loyalty were rewarded by the system to which he belonged, not a rebel or freedom fighter who fought against a system that tried to hold him back.

It is important that black people choose our own heroes based on our own standards and expectations and not on media coronations or assumptions based on skin tone. History shows us that the right of choice has been mitigated heavily by oppression - should then even the right to choose heroes become alien to black people?

Gen. Powell would perhaps make an impeccable hero in the compilation of other American heroes, on a list including the likes of Gen. George Washington, Gen. Dwight Eisenhower, Gen. George C. Marshall and G.I. Joe. But not in the black heroic tradition of Mandela, Biko, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King and Harriet Tubman, who were heroes for their own people and heroes for all people, and not imposed from above.