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.”
