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• United states coast guard a school list skin#

Shelley acknowledges West Point has become more racially diverse, but said the academy has significant work to do to retain and support students of color. “I told the 4th Regimental Tactical Officer about it, and they did nothing.” “I had a racist roommate that would call me the n-word and spit on me,” one cadet wrote. “Though we are deeply disturbed, we hold fast to the hope that our Alma Mater will take the necessary steps to champion the values it espouses,” the letter said.Īn appendix offered anonymous testimonials gathered last year from West Point cadets about incidents they said went unaddressed by school officials. West Point did not respond to repeated requests for comment, beyond reiterating the importance of diversity to its admissions process and to preparing cadets for leadership.įollowing the murder of George Floyd in 2020, which sparked protests around the globe, a group of prominent West Point alums had released a 40-page letter urging the academy to address “major failures” in combatting intolerance and racism. He said the DOD formed a special team in April to advance progress on diversity, equity and inclusion across the entire department, including the academies. Charlie Dietz, said the service academies make it a policy to offer equal opportunities regardless of race, color, national origin, religion, sex, gender identity or sexual orientation. In response to the AP’s findings, a spokesman for the Department of Defense, Maj. “I was walking with a classmate and we were both speaking Spanish when a white, male upperclassman turned around and said ‘Speak English, this is America,’” a 2020 Air Force Academy graduate wrote in one post. Some students of color have spotlighted what they see as systemic racism and discrimination at the academies by creating Instagram accounts - “ Black at West Point,” “ Black at USAFA ” and “ Black at USNA ” - to relate their personal experiences. “We just feel it, we feel the energy behind it, and it just eats us away,” he said. Xavier Bruce, who graduated from the Air Force Academy in 1999 and rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel during his 24 years of duty, said that for him, it was the ongoing slights directed at him as a Black man, rather than openly racist behavior, that cut deep. “It was a very deliberate choice to dig and to push on certain individuals compared with other cadets - white cadets.”

“I was repeatedly in trouble or being corrected for infractions that were not actually infractions,” he said. But off the field, he said, he and other Black classmates too often were treated like the stereotype of the angry Black man – an experience that brought him to tears at the time.

United states coast guard a school list skin#

On the field, he described the team as “a brotherhood,” where his skin color never impacted how he was treated. 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. Some graduates of color from the nation’s top military schools who endured what they described as a hostile environment are left questioning the military maxim that all service members wearing the same uniform are equal. 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. 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. 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. 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.

“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. As a diversity admissions officer, he later traveled the country recruiting students to West Point from underrepresented communities.