Defending Minorities Against the Defense Secretary

 

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.