“Journey from Combat Medic to Advocate”

Higgins: I'm curious, is your advocacy for Black veterans an extension of your military service? Tell me about that.

Brookshire:  Yeah. I guess just rewinding a bit to tell folks a little bit about my journey. I served as a combat medic for seven years. Four of those were in the active duty Army, where I served in Afghanistan and then transitioned into the New York State National Guard.

After I got out of the military, I had a really difficult transition, one that I didn't anticipate and really struggled with my mental health for a confluence of reasons. I didn't get the care that I felt that I deserved from VA. Unfortunately, that led to a feeling of isolation, a year of just unraveling, really. Not an experience that's unique to me, I think a lot of vets go through that, and I found myself on the other side of a suicide attempt.

When I had to get locked away essentially for about two weeks in recovery, I had nothing else to do but read. There was a book that I had had on my shelf since I was in graduate school, but I hadn't cracked open and it was called When Affirmative Action Was White. It's by Ira Katznelson, academic out of Columbia. It looked at the history of social welfare policies, immediately proceeding World War II, to include the GI Bill and New Deal. It showed how the white middle class was bolstered and built by access to a host of different federal policies, and largely how Black folk were locked out of these benefits. There were two chapters that were explicitly dedicated to the GI Bill. Though I'd heard about benefit obstruction around the GI bill, it made it really salient.

Following that, in all the things that were affecting me before I had my suicide attempt were certainly still festering after I got out of the psych ward. There was a lot of anger, and I realized that so much of my experience rendered me feeling very powerless. In engaging with the community, I started to understand that I was part of a larger experience that preceded me—that was cross generational—and that I felt really spiritually called. Even when I was in the psych ward, I remember praying for the first time since I was in Afghanistan, really, seeking a sense of purpose and direction, and where to place my talents and my gifts. This work was birthed from that—an attempt to try to take my power back—but also do something that I felt could be of utility to the community that I was a part of.

At first, when the idea about the project came to me, the name came real natural, but I called it a project because I wanted to make sure that I was doing something substantive. What that would be at first wasn't very clear. I knew that there was a story to tell there, and I'd always looked at myself deep down as a storyteller. But the path for this work was really illuminated by following instinct, sometimes I call it ‘chasing the rabbit.’ There was just this deep knowing inside of me that there was something useful that I could do.

I wasn't waiting for guidance about necessarily how to do it, I was just following that calling. In building community with some other veterans, we started this work, and it just really evolved over the course of the last five years.

Intersectional Identity as a Veteran

I'm a queer veteran, and I think that's also a really important factor in my journey and in my story. I'm a liberal veteran, which is sometimes an outlier, and so certainly that played a role in my experience. I come from a first generation immigrant background. My mother emigrated from Haiti, so I've always seen the world through that lens, and I hope that's answering your question. But yeah, certainly there are multifaceted elements to who I am that informed how I saw my experience in the military.

Founding the Black Veterans Project

It was actually the summer right before I had my suicide attempt that I'd had an inclination that I wanted to start some storytelling project around Black vets. I wasn't sure exactly what it would be or how it would take shape. At first, I wanted to do a film project of some kind and we did a fundraiser. I think one of our first initiatives was try to do a fundraiser. I think we raised like a couple hundred dollars, so we weren't able to do much with that. The progression, I think about the first six months from ideation to execution took about six months.

A couple of weeks after getting out of the psych ward, I went to an event that the Department of Labor had put on for unemployed veterans. I was an unemployed veteran, so I also needed a job. But it struck me when I went there that the vast majority of the folks in the room looked like me and were Black. They had asked a question about those that had experienced incarceration and homelessness. There were a lot of folks in that room that raised their hand, and that also struck me. Just coming out of policy school, my first inclination was like, what's the data? I can see it on the ground now. I'm engaging with these disparate Black veterans groups that are poorly resourced really. They don't have a lot of resources, but there's a lot of love and camaraderie in these groups. They're telling me all these stories, and obviously, I'm starting to read books, trying to piece together the historical narrative in some ways that I know that I'm now part of….

Then after the event, I spent a couple of weeks just Googling, wanting to look at where the data was. I came across a couple of VA reports that didn't quite spell out the disparities that I felt like I was seeing on the ground. Understanding that getting our hands on data would be important, as a first step, we ended up just wanting to form ourselves. We ended up getting into an incubator program with something called ‘Bunker Labs’ where I think it was like a four month incubation period to help us form out what the strategy would be and how we would approach our work. That was formative.

Then I took my first job in veterans affairs. At that point, I had worked loosely on some different electoral campaigns, had worked for the city, had worked in Diversity and Inclusion. That was my first two years out of the military, a hodgepodge of different jobs.

But I took a role leading communications at Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America. That was a really transformative experience. I was there for a year and that was my first time learning the breadth of how veterans’ advocacy is done, who the stakeholders are in DC, how policy takes shape, and just who the power brokers are in the veterans ecosystem. Also just how messaging works, political messaging in this space, and how to be effective.

Taking a lot of that information, I had one year left of my GI Bill, so I decided to go to an intensive documentary filmmaking program—understanding that storytelling needed to be at the heart of what we were going to do. At that point, the first year was really just establishing relationships, and you talk about challenges. You go to these poorly resourced Black veterans groups and say, you want to do this work. I got laughed out of the room a little bit. You know what I mean? Folks were just like, ‘okay brother.’ A lot of folks didn't necessarily take what we were trying to envision seriously. Certainly, white veterans organizations just had no interest even at Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America—although they brought me on wanting to make some commitment to racial justice.

At that point, obviously, Trump was still in office, so there was a desire to not shake the table, I guess in some sense. I felt like I needed to leave that environment and really take a leap of faith, and so it was really during film school, which was in 2020, that the project really started to take shape. At random, I emailed Yale Law School, who has a really formidable veterans legal clinic, and said, "Hey, I just started this project. I'm trying to get my hands on data, and would you be able to be helpful? Would you be interested in partnering and taking a leap of faith on me and this work?" They said yes, to my surprise—

That all was culminating around the time that George Floyd was murdered. It was a time of racial reckoning in our country, and that's when the project really started to have legs. But slowly walked itself forward was establishing that relationship with Yale Law School and me taking a leap of faith—in diving into wanting to get more skills as a storyteller to contribute toward this work and having spent a year that first year building out relationships, at least making some level of attempt to let folks know that we wanted to disrupt the veterans ecosystem and really place race and racial inequities as something that needed to be addressed in a more formidable way. That was really the first year and a half. It's just holding on tight to a vision and trying to move it forward.

My Calling

This work is deeply spiritual—it has to be to sustain it. Because certainly I never thought of myself as a nonprofit professional, wanting to manage a nonprofit. It’s been hard—movement work is often unforgiving and extractive, and difficult, and takes a matter of consistency.

But I feel guided by ancestors. I feel guided by a history that is much bigger than me. I feel privileged to be able to be a voice and to be part of the fabric of people who have given so much to this country and have just asked for really their basic dignity in return.

That's what keeps me motivated in the dark days. I'm surrounded in my office, by hundreds of books, most of which are about Black veterans in some way. When I feel defeated, when I feel, in some respects, maybe a little bit unmotivated, I'm moving through the difficulties of doing this work, I lean on those stories. I pick up one of those books. I remind myself of the privilege that I have to leverage my talents and my gifts, and my efforts, and my spirit really to make some level of contribution.

I really look at what I do as standing on the shoulders of a lot of other people, and I hope to have others stand on my shoulders too. I really think that that's what success looks like.

Racial Disparities in the VA

It was a journey. I think first it was as a vet; I don't necessarily know all the complexities of the VA. So really the first year of even sending up those FOIA requests was an attempt to try to understand the build-out of the VA as a bureaucracy, and how we would FOIA to be effective at trying to get our hands on useful data. Especially because so much of what the VA had said publicly was that they didn't have any data.

We knew that we had a challenge ahead of us, and we were able to work with really brilliant law students at the direction of Mike Wishnie, who runs the Veterans Legal Clinic at Yale. It took about a year to put those FOIAs together. We FOIA'd Veterans Benefits Administration, the Veterans Health Administration. These are all under the umbrella of the VA, and they have different responsibilities under VA in giving access to different benefits to veterans. That took a good year to formulate, and when we delivered them, the VA was basically non-responsive, and so we had to take them to court.

That took another year, but during the process of all of this, there was a lot of organizing happening, and so rewinding a little bit back shortly after the murder of George Floyd, the House Veteran Affairs Committee put together a roundtable of Black veterans groups, and we were fortunate enough to be included in that. In part because I think I understood the Internet…. There have been storied Black veterans organizations that have been doing advocacy—like the National Association for Black Veterans, the National Association for Black Military Women, Black Veterans for Social Justice—that have existed for decades.

But we're a new generation. We have a different tool at our disposal, which is the Internet, and I understood that, and I remember even when I was initially wanting to think through the project, I'd Google Black veterans and there were some disparate articles. There were some academic articles. There wasn't a lot of national reporting on this issue, at all, at the time, so I knew that I could be effective there. But then it was like I saw an opportunity to really leverage the Internet, and so we were fortunate enough.

One of the first media placements that we had was in USA Today, where they did a really nice write-up about the vision for the work that we wanted to do. I guess that came up in Google when the House Veteran Affairs Committee was trying to figure out who to bring to the table because we hadn't really done anything yet. But here I found myself invited to be in this roundtable with organizations that had existed for 50 years, some of whom had existed for decades. In that round table, over the course of the last six months of 2020, there was a decision to form a working coalition for the first time in history where Black veterans groups were going to try to work in tandem together to centralize their political advocacy. Because I had this experience leading political comms at IAVA [Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America] I volunteered myself to help lead the political comms for this coalition, and so that was happening in the background as I was continuing to build the Black veterans project forward.

The VA Buried the Data

We wanted to FOIA the VA from from its founding . . . but we're still waiting on that data, and so we started with looking at FOIA data from 2001-2020. We had to litigate for that, but we were able to show that there were statistically significant and sustained disparities in access to veterans benefits that were uniquely affecting Black vets. Other minority groups weren't as affected as Black vets.

Black women specifically were the most marginalized in these numbers. As much as 29 percent disparity in denial rates for PTSD was one of the more major findings that we were able to show, and that was in the most recent years that we were able to pull.

That was revelatory and we were able to then use that data, and in the work that were doing, the coalition work that we were doing on the hill in 117th Congress. It gave us a lot of power for the first time because we don't just have anecdotal stories of really unjust happenings that had been happening for decades and Black vets had been talking about for decades. We had concrete internal VA data—that they said for decades that they did not have—proving that there were racial disparities, and we wanted to see action take place.

One of the first things that we were able to get accomplished, through the attainment of that FOIA data, was an effort led by Senator Warnock Bill to have a Government Accountability Office study on racial disparities in benefits done that the Biden Administration passed in December of 2021. That study actually gets published at the end of July of this year [2023]. It's only going to look at the last 10 years of data.

But another thing, that came up in a lot of this work too, were whistleblowers. Internal VA whistleblowers who said the VA has actually done internal reports over the course of several decades. They knew that there were racial disparities—that they buried those reports—and that they were negligent in their duty to actually address these disparities. There are whistleblowers that have come forward that have said that VA actually has concrete data dating back decades, even further back to the 1940s, really, that showcase the breadth of racial disparities that they're still hiding their hand about it, and so we're still working collaboratively with Yale to try to get our hands on that data.

Conley Monk and Legacies of the Denial of VA Benefits

That data is actually being used—outside of the obvious federal legislative advocacy—to undergird a case called Monk v. US. I'd like to tell the story of Conley Monk because I think it's emblematic and it's really important.

Conley Monk is a Vietnam vet. He served two tours of duty as a Marine in Vietnam. He got into an altercation shortly after wrapping his second tour with a white superior who called him a racial epithet and found himself on the other side of a dishonorable discharge.

Mind you, Conley volunteered to join the Marines at a time when many folks were getting drafted. He also worked at the VA prior to joining. His father actually worked at the VA as well prior too. His father's also a World War II veteran, who did not get access to the GI bill. He comes from this legacy of service—but also a legacy of obstruction.

It took him over 40 years to gain access to his benefits for the PTSD that he had gotten from Vietnam. During that time though, he became a leading advocate for veterans in the state of Connecticut, helping veterans get access to their benefits—despite the fact that he didn't have them.

When we talk about benefits—we're talking about housing loans, the ability to buy a house without putting any money down. You're talking about education benefits, of which I understand concretely the importance of because I wouldn't even be able to be in a position to do this work had I not had access to hundreds of thousands of dollars to obtain an education through the post-9/11 GI Bill. You're talking about vocational training. You’re talking about disability payments that can add up to thousands and thousands of dollars every single month—and compound it over time can drastically change the trajectory of someone's life and their family's well-being.

Conley won a landmark suit, actually about 2015-ish, with Yale. He started  working with Yale in the early '90s to try to get access to his benefits—was finally able to win a suit in and around 2015. It was a landmark case because it also gave specifically Marines who had been diagnosed with PTSD, or traumatic brain injury, the ability to gain access to their benefits for the first time had they experienced a dishonorable discharge. Before then, it was much more difficult. He was able to get a small settlement that gave him three years of back pay.

But with the new data that we've gleaned—we're making the case that the VA was grossly negligent in its responsibility to address racial disparities, and that Conley is owed for the damages of compensation that he did not get since the early '70s. He's suing for a million dollars in damages.

You think about the wealth that could have been accumulated had he gotten access to VA home loans. The ability of him to either send himself to college or give his children access to collegiate education, let alone all the vocational training and the disability benefits that he did not get access to over decades. When you extrapolate that outward, and I want to repeat that—he's also the son of someone who did not get access to the GI bill—You're talking about billions and billions of dollars siphoned out of the Black community.

When we talk about economic inequality, we can have a real and honest conversation about that without talking about how inequitable access to veterans benefits has compounded economic inequality in this country. That's really what this project is about.

I Did Not Wait for Permission

The biggest thing that I've learned from doing this work is that I did not wait for permission. I did not wait to have all the answers either.

But I learned to trust myself and ask the right questions. To move toward folks who had a similar spirit of wanting to do good work and to continue working in faith, even when sometimes things felt a little bit hopeless. I think the biggest thing that I've learned as well is that the need and necessity, especially for Black organizers to care for themselves as they do this work and so that, I guess would be the message that I'd like to leave with folks.

Full Oral History Interview with Richard Brookshire