Every opportunity I get, I stridently discourage the young men in my family from treating the military as their pathway out. Far too often, in these days of endless war and in wars past, it sends or has sent back to us men with war raging in their hearts and ringing in their ears. Those men, who cannot cut through the madness of the violence they’ve seen and in which they’ve been forced to engage, see Black girls and women as targets—as objects for violent sexual release, as punching bags, as emotional chopping blocks.
