The black population of the US armed forces - 14 December 1990

I'm sorry, but once again, topic A, the Gulf, absorbs most other American concerns.

I think it was about two weeks ago I mentioned how surprisingly little organised protest against the Persian Gulf policy of the Bush administration had come from the college students who, in the past 30 years or so, but only since then, have formed the biggest and most militant bodies of opposition.

I believe why the college protests have been so muted, compared with the uproar over Vietnam, is that this time there has been no draft, no conscription. The American forces have been mobilised around a big nucleus of the regular army, navy, air force and marine corps and then supplemented with units of the civilian reserve, in the form of the National Guard.

But so far there's been no serious suggestion that the Congress should institute a draft. And from the way opinion is turning in Washington, I think it's fairly certain that, at present anyway, the administration could not get a conscription bill passed. And when you hear the protests of individuals, mothers, wives, family, against the president's policy, the anger is tempered by the knowledge that, after all, it is a volunteer army.

All these husbands, lovers, sons, are either professional military or had registered and trained as reserves to be called on. None of them is there by compulsion.

Well, I'm back here in San Francisco, looking across the bay to Berkeley and the University of California there, which set the charge that fired the students' national outcry against Vietnam. But now it seems they're going about their own business.

There are enough of them ready, I should say, to remind any inquisitive reporter that if the Gulf War came to revive the draft, the resistance would be immediate and noisy. There's one aspect of the American mobilisation in the Gulf that I haven't brought up, that very little has been written about, not in the white press, perhaps because it's for us a thoroughly uncomfortable topic. But one for which, if the war does break out, could produce something close to a rebellion among a special 12% of the American population.

As late as the Second World War, black men fought in segregated units. After the war, President Harry Truman, as much as anyone, saw to it that henceforth the armed services should be integrated, and they were. So that, in Korea, and again in Vietnam, blacks fought side by side with whites.

And, they, too were beneficiaries of the GI Bill of Rights which financed a college education and the building of houses for hundreds of thousands of ex-servicemen. Since Vietnam, it's indisputable that for young blacks, the military life has offered more chances, more choices than civilian life, which prompted a black woman journalist recently to muse, "Where would they be if not in the Saudi Arabian desert? Very likely unemployed".

Which also explains, I think, why although blacks constitute only 12% of the American population, they make up 31% of the army, 20% of the navy, 16% of the air force, 15% of the marines – 7% of them, incidentally, are commissioned officers.

Now these are remarkable and disturbing figures. Disturbing, because in previous wars, black casualties have been disproportionately heavy and obviously would be again. A nasty fact about American wars that only comes up in the intervals between wars, when blacks are crusading for some right they believe they are being denied.

I have a feeling that, this time, the black population would not wait for an armistice to exercise this inequity. A black historian has recently summed up what she calls "the paradox of loyalty in the American blacks' historical relation to the military. That, in every war, black people have had to fight on behalf of a democracy that denied them their own civil rights and liberties".

Well, in the past 35 years since the historic integration decision of the Supreme Court in 1954, they have come far by way of acquiring civil rights and liberties that were never theirs throughout the previous 300 years. But, they know better than anybody that black unemployment in the cities is twice, or three times that of whites, that in a recession blacks have most to lose, that about half of all black males between the ages of 15 and 23 have no job. Or any hope of one.

The pain and the crime of the cities bears more heavily on them. An appalling statistic was made public the other day. In 1985, there were, in New York state, literally one or two reported crack babies, that's to say babies afflicted by birth of the effects of their mothers' addiction to crack, the cheapest, coarsest and most fiercely addictive form of cocaine. Two or three, in 1985, in the whole of New York state.

The December 1990 figure for New York state's number of crack babies is 475,000, pretty much doomed at birth to a warped and sick and poverty-stricken life.

I do not wish to pile doom on gloom in talking about the black population which has shown in the past 20,30 years a heartening record of growth and performance in many fields and professions. And to a degree and an extent that doesn't exist in other white societies with black minorities.

But the drag on American society of the very poor blacks is very heavy. And today, too, often their response is one of frustration, rage and slapdash accusations of racism. So that in too many cities there is just now a very uneasy civil truce between blacks and whites. An overseas war, in which the black dead greatly outnumbered the white dead, would offer at least the threat of open rebellion.

There's one other aspect of American military intervention in the Gulf that was unanticipated and that provides a dramatic contrast with Vietnam. It was revealed this week by Mr Louis Harris, whose public opinion polls have proved, down the years, more accurate than most.

This most recent Harris poll has opened up what has been called "the gender gulf". During the '60s and the early '70s, the Vietnamese war was opposed by the young, and by women. Most of its supporters were old and were male.

That is not the story about the Gulf. At present, all the reputable pollsters agree on the ratio of Americans for and against military action. Somewhere between 55 and 61% are against, about 35% in favour. Mr Harris has found that on the crucial question of whether to attack Iraqi forces in Kuwait, American men are exactly divided, 48% for, 48% against.

But women of all ages are against an attack by 73% to 22%. And Mr Harris concludes for the first time women alone have turned American public opinion about a war. They have swayed the polls against President Bush's using military force in the Gulf.

If the White House is listening, the president and his men are going to have some careworn nights before 15 January, the United Nations' deadline for Saddam Hussein's withdrawal from Kuwait. If these polling figures hold – even worse if the popular opposition strengthens – the question might become, not "How can diplomacy contrive a face-saving role for Saddam Hussein?" but "How can President Bush save face between his own people?" when he finds himself compelled by his own people to renounce force and turn to negotiation.

You'll gather that in San Francisco, as in New York and everywhere else, the Gulf is topic A. But what is happening here by the Golden Gate that is not happening everywhere or indeed anywhere else?

Well, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, which is to say the town council, is facing two proposals which I dare to say do not confront any other legislative body in America, perhaps in the western world.

One is a tough law, passed by 8-1, which requires all government and all private business offices to protect workers who use video display terminals, which is to say everybody, against some of the ailments, visual and muscular, which are known to afflict such workers, to provide adjustable chairs, glare shields, detachable keyboards, special lamps and to provide regular 15-minute breaks.

This measure has thrown private businesses into a frightful tizzy and into the complaint that the law will entail new financial burdens coming during a time of recession.

The other item before the supervisors, the council, is nothing less than a law redefining the institution of marriage. As it stands in the California civil code, marriage is defined as "a personal relation arising out of a civil contract between a man and a woman". The proposal would change "between a man and a woman" to read, "between two people".

If any city can pass such a law, San Francisco is it. Whether a majority in the state legislature in Sacramento will second the motion and so legalise homosexual marriages throughout the most populous state is another, and very iffy, question.

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