Racism plagues US military academies despite diversity gains
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 6foot-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 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 describe 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 didn’t matter. But off the field, he said, he and other Black classmates too often were treated like the stereotype of the angry Black man.
Some students of color have spotlighted what they see as systemic discrimination at the academies by creating Instagram accounts — “Black at West Point,” “Black at USAFA” and “Black at USNA” — to relate their personal experiences.
In response to the AP’s findings, a spokesman for the Department of Defense, Maj. Charlie Dietz, said the 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 team in April to advance progress on diversity, equity and inclusion across the entire department, including the academies.
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.
Following the murder of George Floyd in 2020, which sparked global protests, a group of West Point alums released a 40page letter urging the academy to address “major failures” in combatting intolerance and racism, adding “we hold fast to the hope that our Alma Mater will take the necessary steps to champion the values it espouses.”
Shelley 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.”
West Point did not respond to repeated requests for comment, beyond reiterating the importance of diversity to its admissions process.
The academies are a growing pathway to officer status for Black cadets, 2019 data from the Under Secretary of Defense shows, with about 13 percent of Black active-duty officers commissioned through the five institutions, compared to 19 percent of white active-duty officers.