SIPA STORIES: Fighting two battles: a Black veteran’s perspective

Photo by Joel Rivera-Camacho

By Thomas Rowland (MPA ’22)

From industrial Midwestern cities like Chicago and St. Louis to the Bible Belt of Alabama and Mississippi, Black Americans enlist in the military from all over.

I was motivated by the promise of a better life. I was tired of having my cancer-ridden mother struggle to help pay for my college education and balance her medical bills. I knew that if I served honorably, I would earn an education and, hopefully, a better economic situation in life to provide for her and my family.

However, this path to a better life is not paved evenly. Black service members, regardless of service branch, experience discrimination and inequity at nearly every level of the military. Black service members in each branch are twice as likely to be investigated for misconduct, in comparison to their white peers. And these investigations can lead to punishments that deny access to healthcare and education benefits that could advance their socio-economic status.

These realities are colored by experiences that have become more difficult to ignore after the events of the last two years.

The pandemics of COVID-19 and racial injustice, as well as the horrific murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery have done what I imagined was impossible. They have torn my friendships apart. For years, people I trained with, deployed with, fought with, and slept on the ground with have been a group that I used to support myself emotionally. One by one, I’ve removed many from my life. I could no longer deny that the most toxic threats to my own health and life were from those I served with. My peer network drastically diminished in the summer of 2020. I served and fought with men who view Colin Kaepernick as a terrorist and hail Kyle Rittenhouse as a patriot who defended himself. 

My experience is not isolated: more than half of minority service members and one-third of all active-duty personnel surveyed by Military Times said that they personally witnessed white nationalist rhetoric or racism in 2020.

Personally, the racism I have experienced from even my closest peers did not start in 2020. I recall “racist Fridays,” days when white Marines could freely make racist jokes to their heart's content, in the interest of good fun and so-called “unit cohesion.” This was not a decision made by the Black Marines, and those who resisted were seen as trying to hurt unit morale. White service members typically see the military as a color-blind meritocracy. When Black Marines remind their peers of the organization's history, as the last military branch to integrate racially and today has one of the lowest percentages of Black Americans, these details go ignored. The irony went unnoticed that my peers and I endured racist verbal abuse and were beaten and called racial epithets. To others, the fact that the only Black Marines in a platoon were often punished together for offenses large and small, separate from the rest of the group, did not signify bias.

Many Americans see the military as one of the most trustworthy institutions in the country, with 80% of those surveyed in 2018 expressing confidence that the military will act in the best interests of the public. However, no facet of American life is free from racism, and few efforts to address racial inequality in the military have been made or successfully implemented. Black service members are widely underrepresented in combat roles, which frequently are a promotion pipeline to senior officer positions that can enact internal change. Even senior Black service members with multiple combat tours and leadership roles are frequently passed over for promotion to the most senior ranks.

Greater representation in combat arms and changes to promotion requirements for senior command positions would increase Black representation in the military and foster internal cultural change. When it comes to addressing white supremacy, the Defense Department continues to fall short, even in cases of physical violence against its own service members.

The current Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin III, has indeed enacted new measures to more specifically address extremism for the first time, including punitive action against extremist social media activity and screening new service candidates for extremist beliefs after the January 6 insurrection. The Defense Department issued new guidance and updated its definition of extremist activities in December 2021 to prohibit “active participation in extremist activities,” according to Secretary Austin. But he emphasized that “the department is focused on prohibited activity, not on a particular ideology, thought, or political orientation.”

And within the military, there is not yet an adequate effort to address right-wing activities to subvert our elections or constitutional rights. To date, there is no public plan to partner with the Department of Justice to root out sympathizers or enablers of the January 6 insurrection, and there is no plan to coordinate with the Department of Veterans Affairs to prevent veterans leaving active duty from being recruited to engage in right-wing extremism.

For decades, the U.S military has quickly punished and expelled service members for smoking marijuana. But when it comes to racism or white supremacist violence, the problem has gone inadequately addressed. By the time the 2022 and 2024 elections come to pass, we may not have done enough.

Thomas Rowland (MPA ’22) is a second-year student at SIPA and former Marine originally from Hawai’i. He specializes in security policy and technology’s intersection with justice.