On 12 January 2021, top-ranking Department of Defense (DoD) officials, including the Chief of Naval Operations, issued a forcewide memo declaring that any attempt to prevent the peaceful transition of power to President-Elect Joe Biden would have consequences.1 The week prior, Confederate flags had defiled the halls and chambers of the U.S. Capitol after armed insurrectionists forced their way inside.2 Eleven months earlier, Ahmaud Arbery, an African American man out on a jog, was stalked and killed by men driving a truck displaying the Confederate flag.3 His tragic death foreshadowed the senseless killings of other black Americans, including George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, igniting waves of outrage and protests throughout the country.4 These incidents initiated a sweeping reckoning among many white Americans, including those in the military, with the present-day effects of this nation’s racist past.
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1. Meghann Myers, “Top Military Leaders Issue Warning to Troops after Deadly Capitol Insurrection,” Military Times, 12 January 2021.
2. Maria Cramer, “Confederate Flag an Unnerving Sight in Capitol,” The New York Times, 9 January 2021.
3. Richard Fausset, “What We Know about the Shooting Death of Ahmaud Arbery,” The New York Times, 28 February 2021.
4. BBC, “George Floyd: What Happened in the Final Moments of His Life,” BBC, 16 July 2021; and Christina Carrega and Sabina Ghebremedhin, “Timeline: Inside the Investigation of Breonna Taylor’s Killing and Its Aftermath,” ABC News, 17 November 2020.
5. Robert O’Connell, “Did Colin Kaepernick Really Insult the Troops?” The Atlantic, 30 August 2016.
6. ADM Michael G. Mullen, USN (Ret.), “I Cannot Remain Silent,” The Atlantic, 2 June 2020.
7. Tom Dreisbach and Meg Anderson, “Nearly 1 in 5 Defendants in Capitol Riot Cases Served in the Military,” NPR, 21 January 2021.
8. James Baldwin interview on “The Dick Cavett Show,” 16 May 1969.
9. Helene Cooper, “African Americans Are Highly Visible in the Military, But Almost Invisible at the Top,” The New York Times, 9 June 2020.
10. Cooper, “African Americans are Highly Visible in the Military.”
11. Luis Martinez, “Defense Secretary Esper Effectively Bans Confederate Flag from U.S. Military Bases,” ABC News, 17 July 2020.
12. Robert J. Schneller Jr., “The First Black Midshipman at the United States Naval Academy,” The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, no. 48 (Summer 2005): 104–7.
13. Blake Stilwell, “This Is the First Black Graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy,” We Are the Mighty, 29 April 2020.
14. “Gordon Paiea Chung-Hoon,” Naval History and Heritage Command, 16 March 2021; “Hispanic Americans in the United States Navy,” Naval History and Heritage Command.
15. “Janie Mines ’80,” United States Naval Academy Alumni Association and Foundation.
16. Hasan Kwame Jeffries, “Teaching Hard History,” The Southern Poverty Law Center, 31 January 2018; and Emily Guskin, Scott Clement, and Joe Heim, “Americans Show Spotty Knowledge about the History of Slavery, But Acknowledge Its Enduring Effects,” Washington Post, 28 August 2019.
17. Alia Wong, “History Class and the Fictions About Race in America,” The Atlantic, 21 October 2015.
18. Camille Phillips, “Texas Student Will Soon Learn Slavery Played a Central Role in the Civil War,” NPR, 16 November 2019.
19. “Naval Academy Releases Student Body By State,” WBALTV, 8 September 2014.
20. “Class of ’20 Inaugural Diversity & Inclusion Studies Minors,” West Point.
21. Henry Louis Gates Jr., “What Was Black America’s Double War,” PBS.
22. History.com editors, “This Day in History: Emmett Till Is Murdered,”
History.com, 9 February 2010.
23. “Community Remembrance Project,” Equal Justice Initiative.
24. “Three Books,” Stanford University.
25. Andrea Scott, “Here Are the 46 Books on the 2020 Marine Commandant’s Reading List,” Marine Times, 20 October 202.
26. Amanda Macias, “The Extraordinary Reading Habits of Defense Secretary James Mattis,” CNBC, 15 September 2018.
27. James Baldwin, “The American Dream and the American Negro,” The New York Times, 7 March 1965.
