Investigation: Racism in the Armed Forces
The Associated Press | Series published May — December 2021
Deep-rooted racism, discrimination permeate US military
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.
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.
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 – it was a joke, they insisted – an “angry black woman,” a classic racist trope.
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.
“For Blacks and minorities, when we initially experience racism or discrimination in the military, we feel blindsided,” Davis said. “We’re taught to believe that it’s the one place where everybody has a level playing field and that we can make it to the top with work that’s based on merit.”
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.
The AP found that the military’s judicial system has no explicit category for hate crimes, making it difficult to quantify crimes motivated by prejudice.
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.
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.
The military said it processed more than 750 complaints of discrimination by race or ethnicity from service members in the fiscal year 2020 alone. But discrimination doesn’t exist just within the military rank-and-file. That same fiscal year, civilians working in the financial, technical and support sectors of the Army, Air Force and Navy also filed 900 complaints of racial discrimination and over 350 complaints of discrimination by skin color, data from the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission shows.
In February, Lloyd J. Austin III – a former Army general who now is secretary of defense, the first Black man to serve in the post – ordered commanders and supervisors to take an operational pause for one day to discuss extremism in the ranks with their service members.
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‘We just feel it’: Racism plagues US military academies
Eight years after he graduated from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, Geoffrey Easterling remains astonished by the Confederate history still memorialized on the storied academy’s campus – the six-foot-tall painting of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee in the library, the barracks dormitory named for Lee and the Lee Gate on Lee Road.
As a Black student at the Army academy, he remembers feeling “devastated” when a classmate pointed out the slave also depicted in the life-size Lee painting. “How did the only Black person who got on a wall in this entire humongous school — how is it a slave?” he recalls thinking.
As a diversity admissions officer, he later traveled the country recruiting students to West Point from underrepresented communities. “It was so hard to tell people like, ‘Yeah, you can trust the military,’ and then their kids Google and go ‘Why is there a barracks named after Lee?’” he said.
The nation’s military academies provide a key pipeline into the leadership of the armed services and, for the better part of the last decade, they have welcomed more racially diverse students each year. But beyond blanket anti-discrimination policies, these federally funded institutions volunteer little about how they screen for extremist or hateful behavior, or address the racial slights that some graduates of color say they faced daily.
In an Associated Press story earlier this year, 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.
Less attention has been paid to the premiere institutions that produce a significant portion of the services’ officer corps – the academies of the U.S. Army, the U.S. Navy, the U.S. Air Force, the U.S. Coast Guard and U.S. Merchant Marine.
Some graduates of color from the nation’s top military schools who endured what they described as a hostile environment are left questioning the military maxim that all service members wearing the same uniform are equal.
That includes Carlton Shelley II, who was recruited to play football for West Point from his Sarasota, Florida, high school and entered the academy in 2009. On the field, he described the team as “a brotherhood,” where his skin color never impacted how he was treated. But off the field, he said, he and other Black classmates too often were treated like the stereotype of the angry Black man – an experience that brought him to tears at the time.
“I was repeatedly in trouble or being corrected for infractions that were not actually infractions,” he said. “It was a very deliberate choice to dig and to push on certain individuals compared with other cadets -- white cadets.”
Xavier Bruce, who graduated from the Air Force Academy in 1999 and rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel during his 24 years of duty, said that for him, it was the ongoing slights directed at him as a Black man, rather than openly racist behavior, that cut deep.
“We just feel it, we feel the energy behind it, and it just eats us away,” he said.
Some students of color have spotlighted what they see as systemic racism and discrimination at the academies by creating Instagram accounts — “ Black at West Point,” “ Black at USAFA ” and “ Black at USNA ” — to relate their personal experiences.
“I was walking with a classmate and we were both speaking Spanish when a white, male upperclassman turned around and said ‘Speak English, this is America,’” a 2020 Air Force Academy graduate wrote in one post.
In response to the AP’s findings, a spokesman for the Department of Defense, Maj. Charlie Dietz, said the service academies make it a policy to offer equal opportunities regardless of race, color, national origin, religion, sex, gender identity or sexual orientation. He said the DOD formed a special team in April to advance progress on diversity, equity and inclusion across the entire department, including the academies.
West Point did not respond to repeated requests for comment, beyond reiterating the importance of diversity to its admissions process and to preparing cadets for leadership.
Following the murder of George Floyd in 2020, which sparked protests around the globe, a group of prominent West Point alums had released a 40-page letterurging the academy to address “major failures” in combatting intolerance and racism. “Though we are deeply disturbed, we hold fast to the hope that our Alma Mater will take the necessary steps to champion the values it espouses,” the letter said.
An appendix offered anonymous testimonials gathered last year from West Point cadets about incidents they said went unaddressed by school officials. “I had a racist roommate that would call me the n-word and spit on me,” one cadet wrote. “I told the 4th Regimental Tactical Officer about it, and they did nothing.”
Shelley acknowledges West Point has become more racially diverse, but said the academy has significant work to do to retain and support students of color. In his class, he estimated about 35 Black students graduated — “some crazy low number,” he said. “And we started with a lot more.”
In a sense, the tributes to Lee that still dot the West Point campus illustrate the academy’s dichotomy: Cadets studying military history are taught that Confederate soldiers were no heroes, yet the references to Lee — a West Point graduate who later became the academy’s superintendent — remain.
The latest annual defense spending bill mandated that the Defense Department survey all its military properties for references or symbols that potentially commemorate the Confederacy, including at West Point, which the commission overseeing the work picked as its first site to visit earlier this year. But the deadline to act on any recommendations is still more than two years away.
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The U.S. armed forces were segregated until the mid-1950s, when an influx of fighters were needed for the Korean War. Now, the collected services applaud themselves for 200 years as “the greatest military force in history,” attracting men and women who represent all creeds, religions, races, ethnicities and sexual orientations.
At the academies, integration happened much earlier, following the abolition of slavery. During Black History Month at West Point, honor is paid to Henry O. Flipper, a formerly enslaved man who became the academy’s first Black graduate in 1877. But the West Point that Flipper attended was rife with prejudice: His white classmates and professors refused to acknowledge his presence.
Today, the academies are a growing pathway to officer status for Black cadets, 2019 data from the Under Secretary of Defense shows, with about 13% of Black active-duty officers commissioned through the five institutions, compared to 19% of white active-duty officers.
Most students who enroll — about 60-70% — are nominated by U.S. senators or representatives from their home states as part of a system created in the 1840s to build a politically and geographically diverse officer corps. But today, the changed demographics of the U.S. mean the system gives disproportionate influence to rural congressional districts that tend to be whiter, the AP found.
Only 6% of nominations to the Army, Air Force and Naval academies made by the current members of Congress went to Black candidates, even though 15% of the population aged 18 to 24 is Black, according to a report on the service academies released in March by the Connecticut Veterans’ Legal Center. Eight percent of congressional nominations went to Hispanic students, though they make up 22% of young adults, the report said.
The diversity of nominations has improved slightly in the past 25 years, but the report noted that 49 Congress members did not nominate a single Black student during their time in office and 31 nominated no Hispanic candidates.
In Texas, nominations to the service academics from senators Ted Cruz and John Cornyn included 23% and 20% people of color, respectively -- among the lowest levels in the Senate compared to the demographics of their state, where more than 60% of young adults are Black, Asian American, Hispanic or Latino.
Cruz’s press secretary, Dave Vasquez, said the senator rejects that race should be factored in when selecting academy nominees and that names, race and other personal information are all removed before an external review board considers applications to Cruz’s office, selecting candidates “on objective merits such as SAT/ACT scores, GPA, and community-service involvement.” Cornyn’s office did not respond to a request for comment.
Curtis Harris said he was awarded one of just three nominations to West Point out of more than 300 applications to his congressman. He graduated in 1978 and became the first in his family to rise to the officer ranks, initially becoming a platoon leader overseeing 35 people and equipment worth millions of dollars at the age of just 21. His uncles had enlisted in the Army and his stepfather was a Navy cook, but they had few options for advancement as Black servicemen, he said.
West Point remains a point of pride for Harris: He hasn’t missed an Army-Navy football game in 40 years, and he helps review applications for nominations for U.S. Rep. Adriano Espaillat of New York. He also visits high schools and junior high schools to encourage candidates of diverse backgrounds to apply.
In a society where opportunity is not given out equally, Harris said, the academy provides the “ammunition” to be successful. Yet diversifying West Point is “not going to happen by itself,” he said. “I just think that particularly people of color should know that this opportunity exists.”
The Naval, Air Force, Merchant Marine and Coast Guard academies have generally become more diverse over the past two decades, according to data supplied by the four schools after the AP asked for 20 years of student body demographic data. West Point did not provide historical records, but Col. Deborah McDonald, the academy’s admissions director, said it is welcoming more and more diverse students, with 37% of the class of 2024 identifying as nonwhite. A decade ago, that proportion was more like 25%, she said.
Non-white racial groups did not see appreciable changes at some academies. For instance, while the number of Hispanic cadets increased in the past two decades at the Coast Guard and Naval academies, Black cadets showed no noticeable increase during that time. In the class of 2000, there were 73 Black midshipmen in the Naval Academy -- and just 77 in 2020. At the Coast Guard Academy, there were 15 Black cadets in the 2001 class. And in 2021? Merely 16.
According to the data provided to the AP, graduation rates between racial groups at the Naval and Coast Guard academies continued to show gaps. At the Naval Academy, for example, Black midshipmen still had the lowest graduation rate of any racial group at 74%, compared to the 2020 school-wide rate of 87%. And the Black graduation rate of 65% at the Coast Guard Academy between 2011 and 2020 lagged about 20 percentage points behind other racial groups.
Only data from the Navy and Coast Guard was complete and detailed enough to look at graduate rate trends by race.
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