(The Air Force was hoaxed, but was the lesson learned?)
Douglas W, Kmiec
U.S. Ambassador (ret.); former head of OLC to Presidents Reagan and George Bush (41).
Chair, Constitutional Law, Pepperdine University
"My red line is cadets who can't treat each other with respect and dignity," or so said Lieut. Gen. Jay Silveria, the present Superintendent of the Air Force Academy. The late September heated scolding of the cadets of that valued institution followed what appeared to be the scribbling of racial epithets on message boards near the rooms of five black students. These students were attending a special prep program explicitly designed to help those who did not gain admission in the regular way to possibly gain it in the future.
Putting on the uniform of the United States Air Force should, one would think, be enough to convey that race or ethnic origin are irrelevancies that have no place in the advancement of the American idea of equal protection of the law. One hopes that the prep program, itself, has been operated without discrimination and is available for all Americans.
In short, there is no justifying the use of the N-word or otherwise denigrating someone on the basis of race. I take that to be the General’s message and it is unassailable.
But it has now been confirmed that it was one or more of the black students who wrote the epithets in a perverse and offensive use of the W word.
Slavery and the follow-on years of Jim Crow created an injustice that can never be rectified fully from this land. That said, our beloved nation has done important work since the 1950s to fashion laws protecting the civil rights of all. Most of these efforts reflect a good faith desire to reconcile present nondiscrimination with an appropriate level of outreach to remedy -- at least in individual lives -- any continuing incidence of past discrimination.
But there’s a problem: identity politics is a form of discrimination. The politics of identity too freely employ stereotype under the pretext of justice and empathy. If we are to see both sides, it is not possible to rely upon race or other immutable trait to justify favoring or disfavoring one person over another.
It was not a surprise that the General’s initial presentation condemning racial slurs against minority students went viral. Many people around the country expressed approval of the General’s commentary. Regretfully, the General has only lamely commented after the hoax was uncovered revealing the incident to be discrimination in reverse. Maybe the General will deliver a more fulsome addendum to his initial public spanking indicating that the red line is crossed when either black or white students are intimidated by the other; moreover, it matters not whether the means of intimidation or exclusion is crude epithet or false accusation.
The hoax built on racial stereotype had difficulty being noticed by a media that was practically giddy over the first lesbian this or the first transgendered that, or the first whatever securing office in the off-year election. It is amusingly tragic that the same media that wrings its collective hands night after redundant night over President Trump’s bluntness cannot see how making the significance of who is elected turn on stereotype corrupts any meaningful assessment of the women and men standing for office.
So what will the lionized General Silveria do? Speaking out against demeaning and disgusting racial reference in either direction is what is needed. Doing so will not make the General popular, but it would be an act of honesty and courage. This is especially true since the General impliedly and gratuitously criticized his commander-in-chief by making un-nuanced reference to Charlottesville and the NFL’s Kaepernick problem.
In Charlottesville, the President took a pounding for attempting to say that there were some “good people on both sides,” when in fact – sadly – there, and in other instances like it, decision-making has become so thoroughly racialized that there are not enough good people to go around.
The beginning of wisdom is to recognize when there is bad on both sides, and to understand why. Quite simply, perpetuating inequality based on identity is the pursuit of injustice.