Forthcoming Article

Beyond Double Consciousness: Black Veteranality as a Framework for Military History

by Bryon L. Garner, Ph.D.

Abstract

Despite decades of groundbreaking scholarship on Black military service, the category of the veteran remains undertheorized as a racialized and gendered historical actor in military history. Existing studies trace patterns of discrimination, valor, and protest across America’s wars, yet the field still lacks a portable analytic vocabulary that travels across archives, wars, and commemorative practices. This article introduces Black veteranality as a historian’s tool—a framework that names the historically produced condition where Blackness, military service, and claims to the rights and recognition of citizenship converge within institutions that demand patriotic sacrifice while distributing recognition, protection, and benefits unequally. Building from W. E. B. Du Bois’s double consciousness, Emma Murray’s veteranality, Veteran Critical Theory, and the rich scholarship of Black military history, the framework highlights three recurrent dynamics: tripartite consciousness (the intersection of Black, American, and veteran identities), racialized moral injury (the political and ethical damage when sacrifice meets abandonment), and contested patriotism (critique as a demanding form of love of country). Black veteranality is especially useful for reperiodizing military history—extending analysis from battlefield to pension board, veterans’ organizing, benefit administration, and public memory. A review of the American Historical Association’s discourse demonstrates that the profession is prepared for a framework that joins military history to race, citizenship, and memory. In the experience of Black veterans, criticism of the nation has often emerged as a strident claim upon its ideals, not as an abandonment of patriotic loyalty.