{"id":114004,"date":"2021-05-28T12:01:00","date_gmt":"2021-05-28T16:01:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=114004"},"modified":"2021-05-28T12:01:00","modified_gmt":"2021-05-28T16:01:00","slug":"ap-says-deep-rooted-racism-discrimination-permeate-us-military","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=114004","title":{"rendered":"AP says “Deep-rooted racism, discrimination permeate US military”"},"content":{"rendered":"

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We’ve had these conversations before. The US military I took part in was the most color-blind place I’ve ever lived and worked. It was a near-perfect meritocracy. People weren’t judged by what color, religion, or ethnic background they possessed, they were judged by how well they could do their jobs.<\/p>\n

I know that this was the same in decades past. My father (Vietnam Vet) had a sergeant he worked for at Fort Huachuca circa 1971. The sergeant was about to leave the service and on his final day his wife came in. My old man was surprised the sergeant’s wife was black. It was then that he realized he should have expected it, the sergeant himself was black. He hadn’t really noticed it until that point.<\/p>\n

I don’t know what has changed in the last 15 years since I got out, but apparently racism in the ranks has made a huge comeback.<\/p>\n

From the AP<\/a>;<\/p>\n

For Stephanie Davis, who grew up with little, the military was a path to the American dream, a realm where everyone would receive equal treatment. She joined the service in 1988 after finishing high school in Thomasville, Georgia, a small town said to be named for a soldier who fought in the War of 1812.<\/p>\n

Over the course of decades, she steadily advanced, becoming a flight surgeon, commander of flight medicine at Fairchild Air Force Base and, eventually, a lieutenant colonel.<\/p>\n

But many of her service colleagues, Davis says, saw her only as a Black woman. Or for the white resident colleagues who gave her the call sign of ABW \u2013 it was a joke, they insisted \u2013 an \u201cangry black woman,\u201d a classic racist trope.<\/p>\n

White subordinates often 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 acknowledge her. She was attacked with racial slurs. And during her residency, she was the sole Black resident in a program with no Black faculty, staff or ancillary personnel.<\/p>\n

\u201cFor Blacks and minorities, when we initially experience racism or discrimination in the military, we feel blindsided,\u201d Davis said. \u201cWe\u2019re taught to believe that it\u2019s the one place where everybody has a level playing field and that we can make it to the top with work that\u2019s based on merit.\u201d<\/p>\n

In interviews with The Associated Press, current and former enlistees and officers in nearly every branch of the armed services described a deep-rooted culture of racism and discrimination that stubbornly festers, despite repeated efforts to eradicate it.<\/p>\n

The AP found that the military\u2019s judicial system has no explicit category for hate crimes, making it difficult to quantify crimes motivated by prejudice.<\/p>\n

The Defense Department also has no way to track the number of troops ousted for extremist views, despite its repeated pledges to root them out. More than 20 people linked to the Jan. 6 siege of the U.S. Capitol were found to have military ties.<\/p>\n

The AP also found that the Uniform Code of Military Justice does not adequately address discriminatory incidents and that rank-and-file people of color commonly face courts-martial panels made up of all-white service members, which some experts argue can lead to harsher outcomes.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Ah, there it is. Your court martial jury must\u00a0look\u00a0<\/em>like the defendant. It’s not enough to expect that a jury of your peers be made of people of the same or higher rank. This has all the hallmarks of people who see racism behind every tree.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We’ve had these conversations before. The US military I took part in was the most color-blind … AP says “Deep-rooted racism, discrimination permeate US military”<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":664,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[177],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-114004","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dumbass-bullshit"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/114004","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/664"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=114004"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/114004\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":114006,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/114004\/revisions\/114006"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=114004"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=114004"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=114004"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}