Recent Republican moves to limit diversity training and transgender rights and other hot-button controversies stemming from the annual defense authorization bill remind me of my own days in uniform back when some of those diversity policies were being created.
Lucky me, I was drafted in 1969, a dark time that some military officials called the “time of troubles” in the late 1960s and early ’70s. It was a time when the armed forces were facing military defeat in Vietnam and racial strife, poor morale, and reports of urban riots back home, where the war had grown increasingly unpopular — and not just among radical activists.
In just two years, 1969 and 1971, the Defense Department recorded more than 300 racial incidents, including “race riots” and other unrest on military bases and other outposts, including two Navy aircraft carriers, according to military reports.
Among other problems, one study found, Black service members were more likely to be assigned to combat than technical operations and were promoted more slowly — even controlling for test score differences.
The Defense Department, facing transition to an all- volunteer force, took aggressive steps to improve communications, including establishing “equal opportunity councils” in major units and goals and timetables for affirmative action, military-style.
By the first Gulf War in 1991, led by a black general, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Colin Powell, the era of such racial incidents appeared to have passed as the military faced newer challenges, such as the Tailhook scandal, sparked by shocking allegations of sexual harassment.
A foremost study by the late Charles Moskos, a Northwestern University sociology professor, and then-sociology professor John Sibley Butler of the University of Texas — “All That We Can Be: Black Leadership and Racial Integration the Army Way” — described a new military that, as Moskos put it in an interview with me, became the nation’s most integrated institution. “The only place in America where Blacks routinely boss whites around,” he called it.
As a formerly enlisted African American from a family with lots of cousins in the Army and Air Force, I could not disagree with his assessment.
Now, as I see today’s generation of congressional Republicans wage their seemingly endless war against the “woke,” I cannot help but wonder: Do these folks have any idea of how turbulent the issue of military diversity used to be?
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