Army four-star general: talking about racial injustice was like learning 'a new language' for the...

SFC Thomas Foreman - No; that's an honor I cannot claim-and no, I take no insult from your comments. However, I'd like to believe that due to the nature of my limited role as a junior officer, my background as the son of an enlisted man, and my extemporaneous experiences as a lower-wage earning construction worker... I had some limited understanding of what their lives were like; at least I made it a personal point to try. In the Navy (and I presume the Army as well) there are many "crap details" that are never the less, essential. As a young officer candidate (treated pretty much like pond scum) aboard a ship... an E-5 once assigned me to clean an entire engine room. As an O-3 working with a team in Afghanistan, we simply didn't have any junior enlisted personnel...so often, these tasks fell to me, as one of the younger members-even though we had E-6 and E-7 level personnel in our team. It simply didn't make sense for senior enlisted professionals busy with other duties to do things a Reserve officer whose role was primarily confined to operations could do. Similarly, in my division years prior, we often assigned our most junior enlisted sailors to such mundane tasks as cleaning manifolds and "needle-gunning" deck plates. I usually joined in on the latter whenever possible because frankly... there's few jobs as menial or soul crushing as stripping ten years of paint off steel in the middle of the ocean in 100 degree heat. The vast majority of these junior enlisted people were in fact minorities... probably due to the fact that for many inner-city kids, or recent immigrants, few jobs offer the sorts of benefits and potential opportunities... or simply because many suburban white kids are shuffled off to college without any clear reason why, just because that's what people from the suburbs do I guess. Since many of senior enlisted persons doling out these tasks were also minorities... it doesn't make sense to me that any of that was motivated by "race". I could be wrong, and I'll admit as much.

LCDR Joshua Gillespie - (READ THIS BEFORE LISTENING TO CLIP) It does, but I still think you may be applying your personal, anecdotal experience to the situation as a whole and it comes off sounding like, "I didn't see it, so it must not be happening" or must not be real.

The General talks about "microaggressions" which I can understand sounds like something a SJW with time on their hands made up to be upset over... it can be subtle... but I am willing to bet that anyone wearing a MAGA hat on a college campus would get a perspective of what microaggressions are all about. They are intended to fly under the radar, so can be difficult to see or call out. And it deals with deep rooted behaviors and prejudices, many that were set in before anyone joined the military... and I am not certain it is something anyone can legislate or regulate effectively... or even should... but recognition is a first step.

I have also seen on occasion in dealing with race issues where people have gone the entire different direction and instead of trying to suppress behavior instead bring it out in the open, overtly, and in so doing, defuse its power. They lampoons the underlying racial tension making it less effective This is really only effective among tight knit groups and not suitable for the uninitiated. I have attached an audio clip from the movie Generation Kill that gives a pretty good example of how and why this works. WARNING - very salty language. I hope you read this before viewing the clip.

https://youtu.be/2yI5DfFM3Tw

MSgt Steve Sweeney - Great comment; extremely well stated and full of critical thinking points to consider. So-full disclosure: before I "grew up" a little, and put three plus decades of life experience under my belt... I was infamous for being able to speak entire paragraphs in profanity. Like the "clip" suggests-you find ways of inserting yourself into the "pecking order"; rank really means nothing... and even less out in the middle of some wadi as the only "squid" (and officer to boot) among infantrymen. In that sense (and that sense alone-not reaching for any false equivalency here), I understand where "Generation Kill" is coming from in a very personal sense. However, within that understanding is a very sincere belief that most everyone involved (either giving or receiving) sees it for what it is... necessary roughness. My first "culture clash" happened not 48 hours after raising my right hand... when several Hispanics suggested I and my "Tennessee" (you know what) didn't belong. My response was to remind those fine folks that the last time "we" fought, it took about 5,000 of them thirteen days to bowl over less than a couple hundred of we "hicks", and suggested maybe they didn't want a rematch. Fortunately, they didn't call my bluff... and ultimately, ended up being some of my closest friends. The way I saw it then... and the way I see it now, is that tough people respect toughness. Had I said something like, "Oh, I'm sorry if my White Privilege threatened you; how can I apologize?" I imagine I'd have been viewed by each of those people as less than a man-certainly less a man than any of them. It's not that I held Hispanics in low regard, or felt that their defeat of the Alamo was some sort of "racial scar"-Some Texians launched a rebellion and Santa Anna tired to crush it; all's fair in love and war. I didn't honestly feel any of them hated me for being a cornbread white boy either... it was just the obvious "weakness" to exploit. I will say this-because you're right; just because I didn't see something doesn't mean it didn't happen... but neither does that mean what has happened is experienced universally. Maybe some people don't understand that you don't just "join" certain fraternities... or that part of what binds certain people together is how well they take what they dish out.

LCDR Joshua Gillespie - One does have to adapt their tactics for the terrain and their response to the situation at hand. When happening out in the open among a tight-knit group of people who embrace the racial undercurrents as a means of cohesion, that is one thing. But when those same racial undercurrents are at work more subtly and sinisterly, and in a manner that is not from a perspective of mutual respect, that is another. I think what the General is talking about is the difficulty in addressing the latter case and the need to adjust tactics to do so.

As always, good thoughts. Thanks.