At the close of another Black History Month, racial disharmony sadly remains in some of America. While it’s popular today to resurrect ugly history, I would like to hold up better and more instructive history, what the U.S. Army did 50 years ago.
In the 1970s the Army began a recovery from the disastrous Vietnam incursion, rebuilding honor and force quality, not just by improving training and materiel, but even more by focusing on personal accountability. The services are about leadership and when equal opportunity became a major factor in performance evaluation, change took place. Improvement became empirical and grew out of orderly and sincere footlocker dialog, openness, teamwork and kept promises. In my lane, Army Public Affairs and its 400 Army newspapers, we gave voice to the voiceless. Today the Army has a disproportionately positive minority representation and is better for it.
The keys were order and integrity. While the rest of the world can’t enjoy a military culture, these points should still be a force in each mind. Yet, the past year of rioting, injuring, killing and property destruction only serves the hateful and class-warfare interests of socialist extremists. Deliberate disorder is an outright insult to the noble dream of Dr. King. Meanwhile, media voices on both the left and right are beyond bias and doing us no good. They have blurred the line between hard news and opinion while idolizing conflict. The resulting rancor will change only when we, their audience, demonstrate our own accountability for truth, both the ones we profess and the ones we don’t like.
We also need to reject the misnomer “systemic racism,” for the term refers to systems rather than people and the problem is with the latter rather than the former. Thanks to groundwork begun by Harry Truman, Jack Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson half a century ago, every governmental system in America has been made to protect, and in worthy cases, favor minority aspirants in education, housing, athletics, employment, economic assistance and other areas; and that’s a great thing. It’s the law and it should be strictly enforced.
Perhaps by “systemic” racism people mean “conditioned” or “veiled racism.” But a better term would be ambient racism. “Ambient” racism is a more difficult target than “systemic,” for it can be hidden in the secrets of our minds. It can be harbored even by people who are not seen as racist or by those who think they are not racist. We talk a good game and follow the rules, but are our hearts really in it?
That’s where I was in the summer of 1969 when room assignments were being assigned in a Field Artillery Officer Basic Course at Ft. Sill, Oklahoma. I hesitated to offer to room with another second lieutenant, Charley Thomas, not just because he was a stranger but because he was Black. Yet all my life I had argued until I lost my voice against racial discrimination … and thought I meant it.
Fortunately for me we became roommates anyway. During that summer, a nadir of national discontent, we moved and dated in each’s culture, keeping our heads down in case of expected “incoming” that never came. I, an English Lit. major, would never have made it through that course loaded with mathematical algorithms, without him, a mechanical engineer. But Charley helped me much more than with coursework; he taught me how to take a stand, go against the flow and be in the minority.
(Both lieutenants survived Vietnam, Thomas becoming a dentist in Lexington, Kentucky, and Donovan becoming an advisor to the Chief of Public Affairs in the Office of the Secretary of the Army.)
(John F. Donovan lives in Loudon.)