When I hear Pete Hegseth, President-elect Donald Trump’s defense secretary pick, talk about reforming the military by firing generals who’ve supported the Pentagon’s diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, my mind goes to the late four-star Gen. Colin Powell and his rise through the ranks of our military.
Let me explain why.
Powell became the U.S.’ first Black national security adviser, first Black chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and first Black secretary of state.
Born in Harlem, New York, to Jamaican immigrants, Powell became the U.S.’ first Black national security adviser, first Black chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and first Black secretary of state. And the story of his ascent challenges Hegseth’s belief that diversity is the enemy of meritocracy. That false assumption is at the heart of a multipronged attack on multicultural programs. It’s based on the mistaken idea that the only way diversity is achieved is by allowing less-qualified people of color to leapfrog over more deserving white people.
But the story of how Powell was promoted to brigadier general and received his first star is an antidote to that poisonous claim. He was elevated on the watch of another “first Black” pioneer, the late Clifford Alexander, who served as the secretary of the Army from 1977 to 1981. Alexander refused to put forward a long list of officers to promote to generals because the list didn’t include any of the decorated Black colonels who had served with distinction. There was a smattering of Black colonels on the second list that came back, but Alexander sent that one back, too, saying it still didn’t provide a full enough sense of the talent within the ranks. This process happened on repeat until that list came back a fourth time with a larger and more appropriate number of Black prospects.
Powell’s name was on that fourth list. What does Hegseth think? Would he disparagingly call Powell a DEI hire? Would he say Alexander had “woke mind virus”?
In a 1997 op-ed in The New York Times, Alexander argued that Powell’s promotion was a result not of affirmative action but rather of a leveling of the playing field. He said the people responsible for developing such lists “followed my directives, and the result was equity and fairness. Black people with sterling records emerged on those lists.” According to Alexander, Powell “did not get anything extra — but more important, his white colleagues did not get anything extra, either.”
That brings us to this present moment when Hegseth, the man picked to run the world’s largest military, despite lacking institutional leadership experience, is proposing to walk into the Pentagon and immediately oust anyone involved in what he calls a “woke” diversity program.
He has specifically called out the current chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Charles Q. Brown, who faced harsh criticism from the MAGA faithful when he released a widely watched video message following the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer. Brown, who was then the head of the Air Force, said in the video: “I’m thinking about the pressure to perform error-free, especially for the supervisors I perceived had expected less from me as an African American. I’m thinking about having to represent by working twice as hard to prove their expectations and perceptions of African Americans were invalid.”
Perhaps Hegseth doesn’t understand why Gen. Brown felt compelled to say what he said to those in his command. Maybe he has also chosen to ignore Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, who holds the job Hegseth wants. Speaking on CBS’ “60 Minutes,” Austin told correspondent David Martin that, as the only Black man in many of his high-ranking meetings when he became the vaunted 82nd Airborne’s first Black operations officer in 1985, he would occasionally ask a white officer to do the briefings — not because he couldn’t handle the pressure, but because he understood that white officers paid more attention when the message came from someone who looked like them.
That sentence you just read is a bit of a litmus test. Some will ask, “How is that possible?” and perhaps judge Austin for that strategy. But trust me on this. There are a lot of people who look more like Austin who will immediately understand that decision.
Hegseth has said he applauds the decision to end segregation in the U.S. military in 1948, but does he fully understand that one of the primary factors behind Executive Order 9981 was the acknowledgment that a segregated Army was weaker?
Does he understand that one of the primary factors behind Executive Order 9981 was the acknowledgement that a segregated Army was weaker?
Included in a Navy pamphlet distributed to officers during World War II called the “Guide to Command of Negro Navy Personnel” is this statement: “In modern total warfare any avoidable waste of manpower can only be viewed as material aid to the enemy.” It goes on to say, “Restriction, because of racial theories, of the contribution of any individual to the war effort is a serious waste of human resources.” Similar pamphlets were distributed to other services in the armed forces. The Army directive said, “Waste of Negro manpower through ineffective military training, inefficient assignment, and poor leadership born of a failure to appreciate and deal with special problems is no less costly than the purposeful destruction of munitions.”
That’s important. When huge groups of people aren’t able to reach their full potential, our military can’t fully realize its might. Neither can our country.
Hegseth should understand that. He has served in the military with people of color. He has seen their valor in theaters of war. And anyone who has served in the U.S. military has seen the disparities in the makeup of the rank and file and the composition of the military’s largely white leadership.
But for this incoming administration, the war on diversity is a battle being fought well beyond the Pentagon. Other Trump loyalist picks have made similar anti-inclusion claims. It is part of a script that Trump has used since he glided down his golden escalator — Black and brown people are getting things they don’t deserve, and white Americans are paying the price.
That’s a bunch of hooey. But that message has turned out to be sticky and quite potent among voters.
If Hegseth becomes defense secretary, he might want to consider another aspect of Gen. Colin Powell’s story. The general, whose own legacy was marred by specious intelligence claims used to justify the war in Iraq, famously warned President George W. Bush at the outset of that conflict that if “you break it, you own it.”
Hegseth might want to consider that so-called Pottery Barn rule himself before tries to break apart the world’s mightiest military as part of Trump’s crusade to upend the status quo.
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