How Moves Put Military Families of Color at Risk

Jennifer Barnhill is a columnist for Military.com writing about military families.

Moving may be a part of military life, but for families of color and other groups, military moves pose more than an inconvenience: They threaten their safety. That puts our nation's readiness at risk.

"There's an unspoken known factor of places that are red-flagged for people of color," said Ellie Walker, a Coast Guard spouse who is one-half of an interracial couple. "The better relationship you have with your detailer, the better. ... He tells new recruits coming in that too, [saying], 'You know, there's gonna be places that are not great for you, as an active-duty person or even as your family, and you need to advocate for yourself or else you're just going to be at the mercy of wherever they send you.'"

Despite finding a safe and welcoming home near their installation, the moment the Walkers left their neighborhood, they were surrounded by unwelcoming messages. Their local gas station parking lot was regularly filled with pickup trucks adorned with Confederate flags as various groups used the central location as a meeting location.

The Walkers' daughter was just four years old when she first experienced both subtle and overt racism. It started with her being physically separated from her peers, something her parents noticed on the school's security cameras. It came from those peers, when two young boys and a young girl repeatedly asked her why her hair was in braids one week and in an afro the next. They frequently touched her hair, removed her hair accessories, and made comments about the darkness of her skin compared to her siblings.

When the Walkers informed the school, nothing happened. School officials dismissed the behavior as "children being children." It was when the other children began using racial slurs, calling her a "Black monkey," that the school employees took notice.

"They're saying racially charged things to her and that is not OK," said Walker. "That's a very specific term that you heard from somewhere."

Walker shared that her daughter, despite being very young, fully understood that their words were intended to make her feel less than human.

Data shows the Walkers' experience is far from singular. According to research conducted by Blue Star Families (BSF) in 2021, one in three service members of color (33%) experienced "at least one incident of being threatened or harassed" in their local civilian community between January 2020 and June 2021. BSF began collecting this data shortly after the murder of George Floyd in 2020, an event that sparked a nationwide conversation around the prevalence of racism in our country. BSF wanted to understand how this national conversation was impacting military families of color, so it conducted and released a survey that confirmed what people of color already knew: Service members are not immune to racism.

Fast-forward to May of this year, and these fears were confirmed when 23-year-old Senior Airman Roger Fortson was shot and killed in his own home by a police officer in Okaloosa County, Florida.

"Most of the media coverage about his death features photos of Roger wearing his Air Force uniform, drawing shock from some of my neighbors that racial profiling could still happen to someone in the military, but I wasn't shocked," said Brandi Jones, organizing director for the Secure Families Initiative (SFI), an organization focused on helping military families engage in the political process. "Roger's death illuminated a truth that many of us who are Black and brown already knew: A military uniform can't protect you from violence."

That awareness means people of color are making military career decisions based on very real dangers.

The 2021 BSF survey found that 46% of service members of color have considered racial/ethnic discrimination in their installation ranking decisions, and 42% consider concerns about safety due to their (or their family's) racial/ethnic identity.

As a result of these events, SFI launched its PCS Safety Campaign, sharing stories like the Walkers' to raise awareness. And Congress has responded.

"We have an obligation to safeguard service members and their families," said Sen. Laphonza Butler D-Calif., of the Senate Armed Services Committee in an emailed statement to Military.com. "The Senate Armed Services Committee is now seeking additional steps to protect military families during relocations and to make it easier for them to voice safety concerns during the process. Both my predecessor Senator [Dianne] Feinstein and I requested that this language be included in the NDAA [National Defense Authorization Act], and I am thankful that the committee prioritized military families in this way."

Butler and other members of Congress are calling for the military branches to prepare a report detailing their individual compassionate reassignment policies, including "an assessment of a service member's ability to raise safety concerns within the reassignment or permanent change of station process." Currently, each branch offers compassionate or "humanitarian" reassignments to service members whose personal circumstances require a change of duty location, often the result of a lack of availability of medical services or to allow them to care for a loved one in an emergency.

In 2022, Military.com asked every military branch whether its compassionate reassignment policies covered issues of community discrimination. All said that it likely would, but none provided figures as to how many service members had used the policy to move based on those concerns.

"Since 2021, the Navy has reviewed more than 2,000 [Navy Reassignments for Humanitarian Reasons] HUMS requests and approved more than 80%," Lt. Cmdr. Sean Brophy, a public affairs officer from Navy Personnel Command, said in a July email. The Navy was the only branch to respond to Military.com's request for updated reassignment information. The Navy's relatively modest number of applicants represents less than half a percent of its eligible 340,065 sailors and 362,239 Navy family members. That begs the question: Are these numbers a result of a lack of need, or a sign that families don't know these programs exist?

"Any experience of racism that I shared with any of my peers or any leadership have historically always been dismissed," said Marine Corps spouse Khiet Ho, who is Asian American. "People will minimize. They will dismiss it; will tell me I'm taking it too personally; will say people don't mean anything by it or it's just a joke."

In 2020, the Asian American community experienced a heightened period of racial discrimination and violence amid unfounded and racist accusations tied to the COVID-19 pandemic.

On the surface, commands are trying to combat racism, regularly conducting command climate surveys to address issues that disrupt unit cohesion. However, those who belong to racial minorities may not feel as though they have the freedom to be fully transparent in these unit-level assessments. If they are the only person of color in their unit, their responses are not truly anonymous. And if they choose not to share their experiences, it is easy for white leadership to think everything is fine.

"One of our friends [a leader from a past command] said, 'You know, I've been lucky throughout my career that racism has never really existed in the units that I've been a part of,' and I'm like, 'I'm sorry, I've been in the same unit, and racism definitely existed'," said Ho. Ho shared that, during a night of drinking in that command, a white officer got into an argument with someone at a bar and made comments that he was going to hang the man -- who was Black -- from a tree. Ho says when others have heard of this incident, they dismiss the gravity of his threat saying, "He doesn't mean anything by it; that's just him being him because of where he's from," and pointing to being from a region of the country where what he said was an acceptable response.

The military likes to think it is color-blind, a meritocracy that is beyond race. But is this idyllic mentality ignoring the very real dangers posed to service members of color and their families?

The military's "we all bleed blue" mentality says that, when individuals join the military, they leave their individuality behind and embrace the unity and conformity of the uniformed service. However, this mentality does nothing to combat racism. Talking about it openly and admitting past failures is the only way forward. But are military leaders who are tasked with keeping service members and families safe fully free to make policy choices that would help their military families?

Over the past few years, military diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives have been dragged into partisan politics. The Trump administration and GOP have labeled military diversity programming as "woke" and used this narrative to undermine the work done by the Defense Department to course-correct extremism in the military. It's a problem that, if left unaddressed, would leave the military unprepared to recruit people of color, who will be the majority of recruitable adults by 2027. Politicians have forced anti-racism efforts behind closed doors, where they have little to no effect, leaving families like the Walkers to navigate racism largely unaided.

Families of color are afraid to move their Black sons to areas where they will be at greater risk. LGBTQ families worry they will be ostracized. Women worry that their bodily choices will be taken from them. Even straight white families worry they could be persecuted if they choose to pursue in vitro fertilization in certain states.

"You can't just leave who you are behind when you put on a uniform and go defend freedom, because inevitably you still have your skin and tattoos and sexual preferences and natural hair and all these things that you bring to the table," said Walker.