By David K. Shipler
The one
true thing that Pete Hegseth said in his Senate confirmation hearing for Defense
Secretary this week was that the military is a better place for minorities than
perhaps any other American institution. What he fails to recognize is how much
work it has taken to get there, and how much it will take to stay there. That
point was not even made by Democratic senators as they berated him about his
history of sexual assault, alcohol abuse, and lack of management experience. It
was a missed opportunity for serious discussion.
Hegseth railed, mostly
unchallenged, against programs promoting DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion)
and pictured “wokeness” as antithetical to the lethality essential in a
fighting force. Yet actual experience shows the opposite: racial, religious,
and gender tolerance has to be taught, sadly, and if it isn’t, fissures can
open to the military’s detriment.
In 1971, after the decay of
military cohesion as racial tensions and violence spiked among troops during
the Vietnam War, the Pentagon established the Defense Race Relations Institute,
now named the Defense Equal Opportunity
Management Institute (DEOMI). There, military trainers operate on a
pragmatic philosophy about the interaction between bias and readiness. They
summed it up for me years ago, when I visited DEOMI several times while
researching A
Country of Strangers: Blacks and Whites in America: You can think anything
you want; that’s your business. But what you do becomes our business if
you undermine your unit’s cohesion and fighting effectiveness.
Like most conservatives, Hegseth apparently
believes that the natural landscape is a level playing field, and that doing
nothing will guarantee a meritocracy devoid of privilege for one group or
another. (Or, perhaps more likely, he and other conservatives make this self-serving
argument to preserve white males’ longstanding advantages.)
Not only is Hegseth’s position oblivious
to the nation’s history, it’s also blind to the future. Halting diversity efforts
allows institutions to snap back into old patterns of bias and discrimination. The
military “does not do the equal opportunity and fair treatment business because
it’s the nice thing to do,” I was told back then by DEOMI’s director of
training, army Colonel Eli A. Homza Jr., who was white. “We do it because we
have learned that if we don’t do it, we will not have cohesive and battle-ready
units.”
Good training can illuminate how bias works. Often encrypted,
the shifting shapes of prejudice find forms that seem acceptable at the moment.
Criticizing policies that “lower standards,” for example, plays to the society’s
longstanding assumptions that Blacks are inferior. Hegseth uses the accusation to
oppose women in combat. The stereotype is pernicious, for it can impede their
chances for promotion and, among troops in the field, corrode mutual confidence
across the lines of race, ethnicity, gender, and religion—whatever group is
targeted by the generalization.
To expose and correct such images, DEOMI
runs a battery of courses online and in person, lasting from one week to three
months, designed to educate seasoned officers, senior enlisted personnel, and Defense
Department civilians in the dynamics of prejudice; the history of social
inequality; federal anti-discrimination law; facilitation skills; and—according
to one course catalogue—how to “apply prevention and response strategies to
prevent problematic behaviors to include harassment, retaliation, reprisal,
hazing, and bullying.”
Trainees return to their units as advisors
to commanders, as commanders themselves, or to pass their training on to others.
Conservatives often denounce
diversity workshops as attempts to blanket whites with an indictment of guilt.
Indeed, DEOMI’s methods in the early days were confrontational, with facilitators badgering and cajoling participants until they confessed their biases and were
thereby purged. “Chase the honky around the room,” some army critics called it.
By the late 1970s, the approach had mellowed into a more academic rendering of
the patterns of prejudice, which allowed trainees to see the issues spread out
on the table, all the better to understand and rectify them. How it’s done
today I can’t say, but it’s unlikely that colonels would enjoy sergeants trashing
them as bigots.
Not that the military is free from bias even with DEOMI, of
course. Nor can it be free from the opposite extreme of unforgiving dogmatism
that triggers conservatives’ complaints about having to walk on eggshells.
To take the temperature periodically, DEOMI
offers commanders a Climate
Survey in which the rank and file are asked whether people in their unit “believe
that everyone has value, regardless of their sex, race or ethnicity, or sexual
orientation.” They are asked whether they had witnessed people being mistreated
or excluded because of their gender, being “intentionally touched in unwanted
or sexual ways," or being shown sexually explicit materials or receiving sexual
comments about your appearance or body “that make you uncomfortable, angry, or
upset.” Similar questions are posed about whether they hear racial/ethnic jokes, stereotypes, offensive terms, or experience “a
lack of respect because of your race/ethnicity.”
Survey results are not made public,
but I was told that they generally show white men answering quite differently from
women, Blacks, and other minorities, even in their perceptions of what happens to others. It’s not surprising that people targeted by slights and
discrimination feel the sting much more than members of the majority, but it's a reality check for commanders. And that
disparity undermines Hegseth’s insistence that all is well, or would be without
those infernal intrusions of diversity policy.
He said
this in his Senate hearing: “What gender you are, what race you are, your views
on climate change, or whether you are a person of conscience, and your faith
should have no bearing on whether you get promoted or whether you’re selected
to go to West Point, or whether you graduate from Ranger school. The only thing
that should matter is how capable are you at your job, how excellent are you at
your job. I served in multi-ethnic units every place that I worked, every place
that I served. None of that mattered. But suddenly we reinject DEI and critical
race theory, dividing troops into different categories—oppressors and oppressed—in
ways that they otherwise just want to work together.”
It would be useful to hear from
Blacks, Muslims, and women in his units to learn if they had such perfect experiences.
It’s possible; combat can be a unifier. Yet if they did, you can bet it was largely
because of the military’s decades of work that Hegseth deplores.
It's not clear whether the future Defense
Secretary knows about DEOMI or will try to demolish what has become a respected
institution. Located at Patrick Space Force Base in Florida, it survived the
first Trump administration, and while its mission statements contain words detested
by the right-wing—“diversity” and “inclusive”—it has tinkered with the language
to embrace broad management goals “to optimize total force readiness.” That
might have appeal even for Hegseth.