But a lot of her support colleagues, Davis says, saw her only as a Black woman. Or for the white resident coworkers that gave her the call sign of ABW — it was a joke, they insisted an”angry black woman,” a classic racist trope.
White Realtors frequently refused to salute her or seemed uncomfortable taking orders from her, she says. Some patients refused to call her by her proper rank or even admit her. She was assaulted with racial slurs. And during her profession, she was the sole Black resident at a program without a Dark faculty, staff or ancillary staff.
“For Blacks and minorities, when we initially encounter racism or discrimination in the army, we feel helpless,” Davis said. “We are taught to believe that it is the one place where everyone has a flat playing field and that we’re able to make it on top with work that is based on merit”
In interviews with The Associated Press, former and current enlistees and officials in nearly every branch of the armed services clarified a deep-rooted civilization of racism and discrimination that stubbornly festers, despite repeated efforts to eliminate it.
The AP found that the military’s judicial system has no explicit category for hate crimes, which makes it difficult to quantify crimes motivated by bias.
The Defense Department also has no way to track the amount of troops ousted for extremist views, despite its repeated pledges to root them out. More than 20 people connected to this Jan. 6 siege of the U.S. Capitol were discovered to possess military ties.
The AP also found that the Uniform Code of Military Justice doesn’t satisfactorily address discriminatory incidents and that rank-and-file individuals of colour commonly face courts-martial panels composed of all-white service members, which some experts assert can lead to harsher outcomes.
And racial discrimination does not exist just within the military rank-and-file. Every year, civilians working in the fiscal, technical and support industries of the Army, Air Force and Navy file hundreds of complaints alleging race and skin color discrimination, according to an AP analysis of U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission data.
From the financial year 2020 alone, the three services received 900 civilian complaints of racial discrimination and over 350 complaints of discrimination with skin colour.
Austin gave commanders the latitude to cover the matter as they saw fit, but emphasized that discussions should include the meaning of their oath, acceptable behaviors both in and out of uniform, and also how service members could report real or suspected extremist behavior through their chains of command.
A recent survey from The Military Times showed the stand-down was received with mixed reviews. Some service members stated their units went”above and beyond,” but others reported their coaches made disparaging comments that undercut the talks and that the sessions were short and non-interactive.
The Southern Poverty Law Center delivered Austin a letter soon after his purchase, applauding him for his decisive action but underscoring that systemic change on all army levels is urgent.
“People that are indoctrinated into white supremacist ideology present a considerable threat to domestic security and the safety of our communities,” SPLC President Margaret Huang wrote.
The AP reached out into the Defense Department multiple occasions to learn exactly what proactive steps it was taking to stamp out racism, discrimination and extremism, but didn’t receive a response from the book deadline, even though the first outreach was May 5.
When Davis was retired from the Air Force at 2019 after more than two years of support, she felt earth down by overt racism and retaliated against for raping a superior of sexually attacking her.
She noticed how insidious racism is to members of the positions — service members entrust their lives to their fellow soldiers, and a lack of cohesion at a unit can be fatal.
“It creates a harmful and dangerous work environment,” Davis stated. “And many of us suffer in silence because we feel like there’s nothing that can be done.”
“Divisiveness contributes to defeat. As one of the famous presidents said,’A house divided does not stand. ”’
Austin pledged to rid the positions of”racists and extremists” through his confirmation hearing before Congress, which arrived on the heels of their Capitol insurrection.
“The job of the Department of Defense is to keep America safe from our enemies,” he said. “But we can’t do that if a few of those enemies lie within our own positions.”
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It’s normal custom for enlisted personnel to show their respect to higher-ranking coworkers by offering salutes that are held before the gesture has been returned.
After Marine Maj. Tyrone Collier was a newly minted second lieutenant and judge advocate, he had a deep experience with that clinic. Collier, a Black man, was in Joint Base Myer-Henderson Hall at Virginia if he was saluted by a Dark enlisted Marine. But even after Collier acknowledged the gesturethe salute continued.
“He said,’Sir, I just need to come clean with something. … We see Black officers. We never see people just like you and it gets me extraordinarily proud,”’ Collier recalled.
“You can imagine what it’s like to get a Black enlisted Marine who, by way of instance, may want to look at becoming a warrant officer or a commissioned officer or who served under commander following commander and received so few chances to observe individuals who look like them at higher positions,” Collier said. “Representation really does matter.”
Though that prolonged salute happened in 2010, the racial picture has not improved much since.
At the end of 2020, the Defense Department’s Diversity and Inclusion Board published a report aimed at identifying ways to enhance racial and cultural diversity in the U.S. military.
One of the report’s findings: The honorable positions of the reserve and active military were”marginally more racially and ethnically diverse than its U.S. civilian counterparts.” But maybe not the officer corps. Furthermore, it discovered that the civilian people qualified to become commissioned officers was”less racially and ethnically varied than the civilian population qualified for enlisted service.”
The breakdown of all active commissioned officers: 73% white; 8% every Black and Hispanic; 6 percent Asian; 4% multiracial; and less than 1% Native Hawaiian, Pacific Islander, American Indian or Alaska NativeAmerican And also the diversity gap widened the higher people moved up in the positions.
The report highlighted the increasing importance of the representation of minorities reflecting the country’s morphing demographics, saying the Defense Department”must make sure that all service associates have access to opportunities to succeed and advance to leadership positions.”
Several Black officials interviewed by the AP explained the culture must give way if they are to flourish.
While serving in Afghanistan, one Marine officer remembered being questioned by a white colleague about why he had been conversing with fellow Black officers. “Why can’t they simply be officers? Why the qualifier?”
Thomas Hobbs, an infantry colonel who retired after 27 decades of service at the Marine Corps at 2018, was one of the officers interviewed who talked of the pressures of trying to combine in an overwhelmingly”white man culture,” while also feeling the need to outperform white officers to negate racial stereotypes.
Hobbs said that the Marines have performed better compared to other divisions of the service in recruitment Black candidates to the officer corps, but noted that”a lot of them don’t stay in the military past their 10th year”
“At the present time, we have significantly more captains than we ever had before,” he said,”but our area grade levels are in fact going down. Because they are tired from having to behave a certain way all the time and they can never be .”
The Marine who stays on active duty also called it”exhausting,” adding”not only do you have to deal with your own things but whenever a Dark enlisted Marine gets in trouble, they will come to you and say’Oh man, what is wrong with these guys?’ Coming to you like you are the expert on everything Black”
Collier said he felt pressure to behave differently in the initial moments he was recruited, recalling an experience at a formal dinner with a Marine major trying to bring him to the ceremony.
“I was just one of two Black guys who had been applying… and he and I were chatting, and also the selection officer kind of said to us,’Hey, you guys might not need to isolate yourselves in such a manner since it might not look great,”’ Collier said. “I mean, this is one of my very first experiences involving the Marine Corps and I’ve a Marine major telling me I can’t speak to another Black person without stressing about how people will look at us if we are purposely isolating ourselves from the group.”
Other support members of color detailed events in which they said they were discouraged by superiors from openly embracing their cultures. Some said that they were told to avoid speaking languages other than English to not offend their mostly white coworkers.
Former Air Force Master Sgt. Ricardo Lemos, who was medically discharged in 2019, stated a superior once frustrated him from talking to his mum in Spanish on the phone at work”because people can not understand you.”
And some Black girls detailed the challenges they confronted digging a culture that often labels them as”competitive or hard” and their normal hair as unkempt or unprofessional.
However he said he never experienced overt racism credits and there the Marine Corps for making strides toward diversifying its top ranks.
“it is a great concept,’I don’t see color,’ but it really is pretty dismissive. And I think not talking about issues of race actually exacerbates the problem and we will need to be able to chat about such things,” said Gilliard. “I feel the Marine Corps are a wonderful place to get it done.”
The Basic School told the AP that sessions on diversity and inclusion are a core part of the training it provides, such as”talks about the negative effect bias has on leadership, decision-making and cohesiveness.”
This past year, Gen. David Berger, who became the top general of the Marine Corps in 2019, used the occasion of the Marine Corps Association’s yearly Modern Day Marine expo to drive home the message that diversifying the ceremony will probably save lives.
“I’m absolutely convinced: Too much similarity, also much that we look the same, think the same, got the exact same background — we’re going to get killed because we are likely to end up with solutions that we’re all familiar with, but they are easy to counter,” Berger said.
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Racism in the positions isn’t merely a modern stain. More than a half-century past in 1971, Frank W. Render, a Black man who was assistant secretary of defense, resigned over what he viewed as unequal treatment of individuals of color.
That exact same year, the Defense Department established what’s now called the Defense Equal Opportunity Management Institute — the Pentagon’s premier service for education and training applications covering inclusion and diversity within the U.S. military.
“Racist, sexual and bigoted jokes really are a daily occurrence in my’work place,”’ a Marine at California’s Camp Pendleton wrote in a December 2017 poll. “Very little has really ever been done to stop it.” Another Marine stated slurs were commonly uttered by officers and enlisted colleagues with no consequences.
However, not everybody is comfortable filling out the surveys or with being fair. Girls assigned to Navy SEAL units, for example, fear they can be identified since the surveys break down demographics by gender, race and standing and not many women are assigned to special operation units.
Congress and the Defense Department have mandated that the polls be conducted annually or whenever a unit changes commanders, but response rates vary widely across components, the polls don’t fall under the Federal Records Act and they are destroyed after three years.
Employing multiple Freedom of Information Act requests, the AP was able to collect polls for the previous four years, concentrating on the eleven aircraft carriers at the U.S. Navy fleet because of their large population size, which may mimic a small floating city with more than 5,000 employees.
In surveys gathered from 2017, 265 sailors from the USS Abraham Lincoln, the USS George Washington, the USS John C. Stennis, the USS Nimitz and the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower said they personally experienced racial discrimination. But in the fall of the year, the discrimination query , moving from pointed inquiries to widely asking whether discrimination”doesn’t happen.”
Since this change, at 2019, the latest complete year acquired by AP, over 1,600 sailors — 1 in 5 — disagreed, stating racial discrimination did take place in their boats, with nearly a third reporting racial jokes, remarks or slurs.
From those 11 aircraft carriers, the George Washington, John C. Stennis and Abraham Lincoln played worst if sailors were asked about racial discrimination and if they could safely report harassment. In 2019 on the George Washington, for instance, 30 percent of sailors said unequal treatment happened based on race, colour or national origin.
In a declaration, the Navy called diversity a”crucial element to maintaining our highest state of readiness,” adding that”surely our army is better served as it reflects the country it serves and all of its members have been treated with dignity and respect.”
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However, when he came, he thought it was odd that he saw only a handful of superiors and a large dumpster.
Shands, one of the few Black airmen on the Idaho foundation, was impressed with the purchase but clambered on the side to get what turned out to be a practically all-day task, as his superiors watched him search fruitlessly.
He explained it was just one incident among several on the nearly all-white base where he felt singled out, including being told that he wasn’t”constructed” for the military.
“When it was for the purpose of to embarrass and also to emotionally break you, I figure that is what they tried to do,” he explained.
Shands said targeted racism and discrimination continued after he left Idaho and served on different foundations, leading him to leave the army in 2018. He considers a difficult road lies ahead for the Defense Department and Congress, which offers oversight, to address structural racism in the army and prevent other service members from suffering because he did.
But a round of sweeping changes to the National Defense Authorization Act — which mostly funds and lays out policies governing the Defense Department and military services — could present a unique opportunity to begin to turn the tide toward systemic change.
A bill which was passed earlier this year purchased the Secretary of Defense to invent a plan to eliminate all names, symbols, displays and monuments that honor the Confederacy, for example, renaming of army bases like Fort Benning and Fort Hood that honor Confederate leaders.
“That’s one reason those of us here in Congress believe that we will need to eliminate all the institutionalization and the party of those racist attitudes,” Clyburn said.
Buried deep inside the more than 1,400-page bill are mechanisms aimed at changing how the army handles racism and extremism from within. It lays out tracking and reporting requirements for supremacist, extremist and criminal gang activity, and generates an inspector general to manage diversity and improvement efforts.
And it says that the military must include questions to its climate polls that explicitly ask about racism, antisemitism and supremacism.
Additionally, Shands considers the military — like the nation it is guaranteed to protect — also wants to perform some profound soul-searching.
Though he’s moved on with his life, he carries pain and humiliation that he cannot erase.
However, he’ll always cherish facets of his military career. As a public health educator with the USAF School of Aerospace Medicine, he had a direct impact on pupils eager to produce a change on earth. He also met his wife in the military.
After the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis sparked protests that swept the planet, Shands finally confronted among his former superiors — a white woman involved with the dumpster job more than a decade ago.
After the woman posted in a personal military Facebook team that”Black Lives Matter,” Shands achieved to remind her of this incident, telling her he expected it did not take the”murders of Black people” to wake her to the discrimination and racism which exists in both America and the Air Force — including the discrimination she exerted upon him.
The woman confessed she did not cure Shands nicely and had been”incredibly ignorant to recognizing or comprehending several matters, such as systemic racism and the presence of it in the Air Force,” according to the screenshots reviewed by the AP.
For Shands, the dialogue was cathartic, as others chimed in to offer support. However, it also brought home the dualities confronting Black Americans and other people of color, inside and out of the military, who want to navigate a country flanked by racism.
“You are not going to escape racism everywhere in this nation,” he said. “The best interpretation I’ve ever heard of being in the army, particularly a minority or even a person of color from the military, is that the military is a microcosm of standard society.”
