ABSTRACT
W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963) has been proclaimed to be ‘the first sociologist of race’, and even though race relations in earlier times were much worse than they seem to be today, it may be safe to say that race continues to be a problem in societies all over the world (Nkomo, 2009). There are many examples to underline this contention. The racial background of many of today’s tensions between the population and the police – in the USA and elsewhere – is just one of them. In the armed forces this may not be different, although Charles Moskos and others have contended that the US military organization works as a ‘race equalizer’, providing social mobility to African-American personnel that was absent in other sectors for too long. Even so, there is a long history of painful – and hopeful! – events since multi-racial integration began to develop in the military, in the USA and certainly also elsewhere in the world.
