Last week, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Mark Milley had a testy exchange with Congressman Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) over the issue of Critical Race Theory.
Gen. Milley took offense to the military being described as "woke" and said soldiers will study any ideology, including Marxism, not because they are communist sympathizers infiltrating the military's ranks who are up to no good but to gain a better understanding of the world.
"I personally find it offensive that we are accusing the United States military, our general officers, our commissioned, noncommissioned officers of being, quote, 'woke' or something else, because we're studying some theories that are out there," Gen. Milley said.
Critical Race Theory (CRT) seems to be everywhere in recent weeks. To proponents, it is merely a lens through which to view how racism was codified into American laws. And a way to gain a better understanding of the role racism played in the U.S. and how it has impacted the lives of Americans for over two centuries.
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To many on the right, CRT is a case of academia run amok, shaming children with "privilege walks" and indoctrinating the military with CRT's pseudo-science wild claims that all white people are born bad.
In that way, CRT is everywhere, but also nowhere. Even during the debate about the teaching of CRT in schools, many want schools to stop teaching something they have simply not been teaching.
The debate between Gen. Milley and Congressman Gaetz stemmed from the Department of Defense recently having a stand down to discuss extremism in the ranks, seen as particularly relevant after many military veterans and several active-duty service members participated in the January 6th instruction at the U.S. Capitol.
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Congressman Mike Waltz (R-Fla.), a former Green Beret, mentioned at the same hearing that West Point is allegedly teaching Critical Race Theory. Apparently, one elective course at West Point had a class that taught about white rage in America, and, according to Waltz, parents of some West Point cadets came to him in outrage.
"Critical Race Theory should not be anywhere near our military," said former Army Captain turned author Sean Parnell on Fox News, "because it just undermines unit cohesion completely."
Parnell's argument is that CRT teaches people to hate their country and the underlying premises that it is built upon. A critique that is likely based upon the claim CRT teaches white supremacy is a foundational ideology of America. If true, how does a service member serve their country, while also believing it to be founded upon white supremacy?
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For instance, Air Force veteran and NSA contractor Reality Winner wrote in private communications with her sister that she hated America. When her sister asked if she really meant that she replied, "I mean yeah I do it’s literally the worst thing to happen on the planet. We invented capitalism the downfall of the environment."
Spoiler alert: Capitalism was invented in Holland, and China has a greater carbon footprint than America.
Winner was recently released from prison after serving out her sentence after being convicted of, "gathering, transmitting or losing national defense information."
"There were no hyphenated Americans on the mountains in Afghanistan," Parnell said, explaining in combat no one cared about race, gender, or other issues frequently debated in America's culture wars.
Parnell's point was that you can't teach the biggest most powerful military in the world to hate itself and the country it serves. The national security implications are too great for creating divisiveness in the ranks.
While racism may not exist in the fox hole, it certainly does exist within America and unfortunately even in the military at many levels, including at West Point and Virginia Military Institute.
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White male pundits like Tucker Carlson, Sean Parnell, and Jesse Kelly seem to agree with one another that racism isn't really a thing in the military. However, in my own conversations with minority service members (and women) a different picture often emerges, one where both racial discrimination and sexism do exist.
For some white veterans, CRT is seen as undermining unit cohesion and creating divisions in the ranks. However, for many minority service members, racism helped create those divisions in the military, whether their white counterparts realized it or not.
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For the U.S. military, the question moving forward is how to address racism, without resorting to a level of hysterics or getting lost in the divisive partisan politics which dominate Congress.
In the military, senior leaders sometimes tell their subordinates "perception is reality." It isn't true, of course, as perceptions can be skewed or biased. But at the same time, perceptions are often very real to people experiencing them.
Even if Critical Race Theory is not really "a thing" in the military, at a minimum the Department of Defense appears to have a serious problem getting out the right messaging both internally to the troops as well as to the general public.
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