By David K. Shipler 

                The onetrue thing that Pete Hegseth said in his Senate confirmation hearing for DefenseSecretary this week was that the military is a better place for minorities thanperhaps any other American institution. What he fails to recognize is how muchwork it has taken to get there, and how much it will take to stay there. Thatpoint was not even made by Democratic senators as they berated him about hishistory of sexual assault, alcohol abuse, and lack of management experience. Itwas a missed opportunity for serious discussion.

Hegseth railed, mostlyunchallenged, against programs promoting DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion)and pictured “wokeness” as antithetical to the lethality essential in afighting force. Yet actual experience shows the opposite: racial, religious,and gender tolerance has to be taught, sadly, and if it isn’t, fissures canopen to the military’s detriment.

In 1971, after the decay ofmilitary cohesion as racial tensions and violence spiked among troops duringthe Vietnam War, the Pentagon established the Defense Race Relations Institute,now named the Defense Equal OpportunityManagement Institute (DEOMI). There, military trainers operate on apragmatic philosophy about the interaction between bias and readiness. Theysummed it up for me years ago, when I visited DEOMI several times whileresearching ACountry of Strangers: Blacks and Whites in America: You can think anythingyou want; that’s your business. But what you do becomes our business ifyou undermine your unit’s cohesion and fighting effectiveness.    

Like most conservatives, Hegseth apparentlybelieves that the natural landscape is a level playing field, and that doingnothing will guarantee a meritocracy devoid of privilege for one group oranother. (Or, perhaps more likely, he and other conservatives make this self-servingargument to preserve white males’ longstanding advantages.)

Not only is Hegseth’s position obliviousto the nation’s history, it’s also blind to the future. Halting diversity effortsallows institutions to snap back into old patterns of bias and discrimination. Themilitary “does not do the equal opportunity and fair treatment business becauseit’s the nice thing to do,” I was told back then by DEOMI’s director oftraining, army Colonel Eli A. Homza Jr., who was white. “We do it because wehave learned that if we don’t do it, we will not have cohesive and battle-readyunits.”

The military is hardly free ofbias, of course, and good training can illuminate how it works. Often encrypted,the shifting shapes of prejudice find forms that seem acceptable at the moment.Criticizing policies that “lower standards,” for example, plays to the society’slongstanding assumptions that Blacks are inferior. Hegseth uses the accusation tooppose women in combat. The stereotype is pernicious, for it can impede theirchances for promotion and, among troops in the field, corrode mutual confidenceacross the lines of race, ethnicity, gender, and religion—whatever group istargeted by the generalization.

To expose and correct such images, DEOMIruns a battery of courses online and in person, lasting from one week to threemonths, designed to educate seasoned officers, senior enlisted personnel, and DefenseDepartment civilians in the dynamics of prejudice; the history of socialinequality; federal anti-discrimination law; facilitation skills; and—accordingto one course catalogue—how to “apply prevention and response strategies toprevent problematic behaviors to include harassment, retaliation, reprisal,hazing, and bullying.”

Trainees return to their units as advisorsto commanders, as commanders themselves, or to pass their training on to others.

Conservatives often denouncediversity workshops as attempts to blanket whites with an indictment of guilt.Indeed, DEOMI’s methods in the early days were confrontational, with facilitators,badgering and cajoling participants until they confessed their biases and werethereby purged. “Chase the honky around the room,” some army critics called it.By the late 1970s, the approach had mellowed into a more academic rendering ofthe patterns of prejudice, which allowed trainees to see the issues spread outon the table, all the better to understand and rectify them. How it’s donetoday I can’t say, but it’s unlikely that colonels would enjoy sergeants trashingthem as bigots.

 Not that the military is free from bias even with DEOMI, ofcourse. Nor can it be free from the opposite extreme of unforgiving dogmatismthat triggers conservatives’ complaints about having to walk on eggshells.

To take the temperature periodically, DEOMIoffers commanders a ClimateSurvey in which the rank and file are asked whether people in their unit “believethat everyone has value, regardless of their sex, race or ethnicity, or sexualorientation.” They are asked whether they had witnessed people being mistreatedor excluded because of their gender, being “intentionally touched in unwantedor sexual ways, or being shown sexually explicit materials or receiving sexualcomments about your appearance or body “that make you uncomfortable, angry, orupset.”  Similar questions are posed about whether they hearracial/ethnic jokes, stereotypes, offensive terms, or experience “alack of respect because of your race/ethnicity.”

Survey results are not made public,but I was told that they generally show white men answering quite differently fromwomen, Blacks, and other minorities, even in their perceptions of what happens to others. It’s not surprising that people targeted by slights anddiscrimination feel the sting much more than members of the majority, but it's a reality check for commanders. And thatdisparity undermines Hegseth’s insistence that all is well, or would be withoutthose infernal intrusions of diversity policy.

            He saidthis in his Senate hearing: “What gender you are, what race you are, your viewson climate change, or whether you are a person of conscience, and your faithshould have no bearing on whether you get promoted or whether you’re selectedto go to West Point, or whether you graduate from Ranger school. The only thingthat should matter is how capable are you at your job, how excellent are you atyour job. I served in multi-ethnic units every place that I worked, every placethat I served. None of that mattered. But suddenly we reinject DEI and criticalrace theory, dividing troops into different categories—oppressors and oppressed—inways that they otherwise just want to work together.”

It would be useful to hear fromBlacks, Muslims, and women in his units to learn if they had such perfect experiences.It’s possible; combat can be a unifier. Yet if they did, you can bet it was largelybecause of the military’s decades of work that Hegseth deplores.

 It's not clear whether the future DefenseSecretary knows about DEOMI or will try to demolish what has become a respectedinstitution. Located at Patrick Space Force Base in Florida, it survived thefirst Trump administration, and while its mission statements contain words detestedby the right-wing—“diversity” and “inclusive”—it has tinkered with the languageto embrace broad management goals “to optimize total force readiness.” Thatmight have appeal even for Hegseth.