HOW THE MILITARY INDOCTRINATES DIVERSITY

It is here that all branches of the military annually send nearly 1,000 mostly junior and mid-level enlisted men and women (with a healthy smattering of officers) to become Equal Opportunity Advisors. The trainees are taught to enhance “leadership and readiness by fostering positive human relations” while maximizing “unit cohesion and combat readiness” at this “center of excellence for promoting dignity and worth.” Put simply, the Institute is boot camp for diversity trainers.

It is hardly surprising that in light of some of its recent race-and-gender media spectaculars, the military is loath to miss an opportunity to bow in the direction of the diversity gods. But it seems a bit off the point, considering that the armed services have historically been considered our most successful model of integration. By the Institute’s own reckoning (from the hundreds of thousands of surveys they’ve conducted), satisfaction with our military’s equal-opportunity climate is solidly above average even among minorities and females — some say in spite of the valiant efforts of Equal Opportunity Advisors to sensitize the troops to any perceived slights or differences. Minority representation in the military is often disproportionately higher than in the general population, and the Institute’s numbers show that even after years of budget cutbacks, white males are the only group who have seen their numbers steadily erode since 1990, while minority numbers have significantly increased even in the upper ranks.

What nobody can quibble with is the effectiveness of the military brass in carrying out the most banal directives with utter devotion and institutional solemnity, and that is all the more true in its current drawndown, peacekeeping, bored-off-its-keister repose. Witness the Institute, which, by hook or crook or Department of Defense mandate, serves to modify not only the behavior but the internal attitudes of the armed services’ 1.4 million personnel — and it doesn’t care how infantile or insulting it has to be to do it.

Like its civilian counterparts — 75 percent of big business now imposes some form of diversity training on its employees — the Institute is afloat in enough mission statements, vision statements, and team-building statements to publish several TQM desk calendars. Unlike its civilian counterparts, the military drafts its diversity talent not from outside consultants but from the ranks. That means many trainees become Equal Opportunity Advisors whether they want to or not.

Though enthusiasm isn’t mandatory, it certainly helps, as the 15-week course is no cinch. It is the diversity trainer’s equivalent of SEAL training — minus fighting riptides with 125-lb. packs on your back. Over the span of four months, the Equal Opportunity Advisors will attend countless lectures, watch videos like the “Oprah Winfrey Racism Series,” peel themselves and each other like Vidalia onions down to their very raw essences in daily group processing, take six exams, write five papers, and give four speeches. After they are broken down and rebuilt and indoctrinated (some 17,000 have gone through the Institute’s training), they return to their units for two- and three-year billets (except in the Air Force, where this is an actual career track) to advise their commanders on equal-opportunity issues. They also handle equal-opportunity complaints, conduct ethnic observances, and most important, “educate” all the rest of their branches with a truncated version of this same training.

The curriculum features large instruction blocks on the rather dry business of Organizational Process Theory, Survey Considerations, and Managing Statistical Data. But the meat and potatoes of the Institute is the students examining themselves for bias, overcoming any anachronistic sense of military stoicism to reveal, in the words of the abundantly sensitive public affairs officer, Maj. Gary Perugini, “This is who I think I am, this is who I feel I am.” This isn’t, Institute attendees will tell you, diversity training for political correctness’s sake. “The war machine needs to be ready,” Perugini says over the strains of “Volare” and between bites of eggplant parmigiana at a local Italian eatery. “There/s a little bit of ‘Here comes the morals police,'” he concedes, but he reports chipperly that “most people want us to be involved, they want us to make a difference.”

Born in 1971 during the very real race-relations tumult of the Vietnam era, which saw race riots on bases and aircraft carriers pulled off line due to racial tensions, the Defense Race Relations Institute at first focused solely on black-white relations. The early sessions were intense shock-therapy affairs with crusading facilitators aggressively settling scores with privileged Caucasians. Exercises often ended in fisticuffs. By 1979, the name and mission changed to the much broader Defense Equal Opportunity Management Institute, concentrating on other races, gender, and anyone poking a nose under the grievance-group umbrella.

While there hasn’t been a fight in years, “people cry almost every day,” one of the trainers tells me. And after complete submersion in the Institute’s curriculum for a week — the model for equal-opportunity training in all the services — it is easy to see why.

The first lecture I witnessed at the Institute was entitled “The White Male Club,” taught, most appropriately, by a white male, Chief Petty Officer David Higgins. He started by vowing that if at any point he said that all white males discriminate or that they aren’t making valuable contributions to society “we’ll go to the base armory, check out weapons, and you can shoot me. ” Some white males already looked like they were hoping for a slip.

Higgins quickly outlined the clandestine operating procedures of this most elusive club. The only entry requirement: be born a white male. The only revocation of membership: death. The only rule: “Don’t buck the system.” The privileges: too numerous to catalog. The picture Higgins painted was that whether old-money WASP or first-generation bricklayer, if you are sporting a white face, every day resembles that old Saturday Night Live skit where Eddie Murphy transforms himself into a white guy and, as soon as there are no black people around, watches as whites break into song, distribute party favors, and make low-interest-rate loans back and forth while sipping Tattinger’s out of each other’s Cole Hahns.

Using the Socratic method, Higgins rolled into a quiz. Q: Who are the white males that sustain power over us? A: Ted Turner, Alan Greenspan, and Bill Gates. Q: When someone not in power breaks the rules, what happens? A: They’re slam-dunked. Q: When someone in power does the same thing? A: They change the rules. Q: Do you think generals and admirals make decisions about and for us? A: (unison) Yes! Q: And they are predominantly . . . A: (unison) White males!

Higgins spoke of Japanese internment camps, exploitation of Hispanics, and ” our forefathers” breaking over 400 Native American treaties. “Your forefathers,” corrected one black soldier. Higgins spoke of the delineation between field slaves and the lighter house slaves. “And how do you suppose they got that way?” he asked. A black army sergeant responded: “With Mr. Elmo Tiptoe takin’ liberties!”

Higgins spoke of The Bell Curve, forgetting its authors’ names but remembering they, too, were white males. “I’m a white male, and I know a whole lot of African-American people who are a lot smarter than me,” he confided, to the surprise of few. He went on to postulate that John F. Kennedy was killed for his civil-rights advocacy (“I don’t know that, but it could be”) and that Martin Luther King might have been whacked by the FBI (” Don’t quote Chief Higgins saying Dr. King was killed by J. Edgar Hoover, ” cause I don’t know that either. But is it possible?”).

He’d also heard a hot rumor that the codes you hear buzzing overhead at K- mart are actually signals for employees to tail minorities in order to prevent shoplifting. Of this too, he was uncertain, which didn’t keep him from holding forth: “I cannot say that’s the policy and that’s what those codes mean. But we’re back to perception, and is that perception a reality to the person that has that perception? Absolutely.”

To complement this lecture, as with all lectures, the students go “back to group” to “process” the information and participate in exercises in case the point was missed. These exercises are monitored from “the fishbowl,” a room containing one of the six groups of 12 to 15 students who are viewed through a two-way mirror from an adjoining observation room, where we voyeurs listen on a scratchy speaker or at a panel straight out of NASA control. It consists of a bank of monitors, headphones, and VCRs so the trainers can come back and listen to their groups in absentia while recording them for posterity.

As I hunkered down to prepare for the White Male Club exercise, a white male Navy trainer popped in to spy a glance at the group he led. “My group’s been holding back on the white males when I’ve been in there — now let’s see what they do when I’m not,” he said, as serious as triple-bypass surgery. ” They’ve got to understand it’s about business, it’s about duty, it’s about the isms.” By which he meant racism, sexism, etc.

The exercise itself was deemed “an introduction to new white consciousness,” as all white males in each group are called to the front of the room, where the facilitator instructs them to develop a society promoting equality and fairness by addressing issues such as employment methods and family values.

Whether they set up the mock societies independently or delegate to the rest of the class, they tried to appease all parties while carrying out their instructions. On the heels of the lecture, it didn’t go smoothly. In most groups, the white males were chastised for making decisions on behalf of the group. In one group, where the white males decided to let the entire group make decisions, they were chastised anyway by a black male: “Look what you’re doing, you’re saying we will decide to let you all decide.”

There were a few white males with a little fight left in them, like one Air Force captain who started raising his voice as the blood vessels on his burr- head began to dilate and turn deep crimson. “What you’re saying is I’m going to lose either way,” he protested. “I have to make a decision.” He was, of course, following the antiquated, hierarchical notion of the chain of command, and was promptly condemned for having a presumptuous attitude of privilege even though the captain insisted, “That was not my intent.”

Another white male kindly rebuked him: “But that’s the perception you’re giving off.”

Success! This is precisely the kind of aha! payoff Chief Higgins promised when he told me the objective of the exercise was “to let them know that their bias is inherent. You’re trying to do the right thing and it turns out to be wrong — because it’s just inbred in you.”

It is not all business at the Defense Equal Opportunity Management Institute. The trainees play lots of games, like the Car Parts Sheet, a group- dynamics feedback exercise in which members must designate their cohorts ” steering wheels (keeps the group on track, heading on line toward the goal)” or “potholes (makes every trip rough going).” They also play Power Poker, a stacked game of five-card draw between the “haves and have nots.” It is an institutional-racism exercise usually headed up by white-male dealers and bankers (just to make it interesting), in which our best and brightest exhibit greed, pettiness, and venality as they quit in frustration, accuse others of bias, and, in one case, palm extra cards to overcome any deficits.

This is how they get to know each other. And if the Institute had a fight song, it would be “Getting to Know You,” or maybe “Getting to Know Me,” as that is even more important. It was after all, Lao-tse who said, “He who knows others is learned, he who knows himself is wise.” And since he said it in 600 B.C., as the curriculum reminds us, he should be forgiven for “his exclusionary language.” At the Institute, there is no aspect of the self that does not warrant rigorous examination. Students not only consider “the things I know about myself and others know” and the “things I don’t know about myself but the group does know,” but also “the things I know about myself but the group doesn’t know” as well as the all-important “things neither the group nor I know about myself.”

Just to ensure everyone knows as much about you as possible, Equal Opportunity Advisors are supplied with magic markers, clip art, and manila folders to make special Institute “badges,” intended to reveal their personal characteristics. That way, when Sgt. Johnson suggests you may be a sexist cracker, you can look at her badge and it will tell you that her ” socialization” is that of a pinochle-playing, bow-hunting, Presbyterian Black Female who considers herself loyal, honest, and a little bit shy. But once you characterize yourself, it’s not so easy to change your badge status. If, for instance, Sgt. Johnson wants to make an alteration in her badge — admitting that she is actually a “crossbow hunter” instead of a “bow hunter” – – then “changes may not go unclarified! Trainers must discuss that event.”

To keep the rules straight, there are lists — lots of lists. There are the “Nine Group Norms” and the “17 Common Barriers to Effective Listening” and the “13 Trainer Expectations” (“Don’t dump and run! Don’t play games!”). Though humor is permitted, it is also governed by one of the “15 Suggestions to the Discussion Leaders”: “If someone disrupts with too much humor, jokes and wisecracks, enjoy it for a while and then say, ‘Now let’s get down to business.'”

Not only is cracking wise an impediment to readiness, but the levity moratorium also keeps the trainees prepped for “SEEs” (Significant Emotional Events) while they think about the Big Issues: like why the local Lobster Shanty restrooms have pink doors for women and blue doors for men, or why female actors are called “actresses” while male stewards are called “flight attendants,” or whether it’s appropriate to use the term “flip-chart” since ” to a Filipino person, that could be very offensive.”

Yes, this is the military, and maybe it takes military discipline to dog- paddle through the bottomless fjords of Gestalt theory, Abraham Maslow’s ” Theory of Human Motivation,” and “The 1972 Handbook for Group Facilitators” as well as “The McDonnell Douglas Code of Ethics.” It is no snap improving communication skills by giving impromptu speeches on “How to Make a Peanut Butter and Jelly Sandwich” in between filling out your majority and minority ” Racism Inventories,” your “Racism and Sexism Questionnaire,” and your “Ain’t I A Woman History Trivia” quiz. There’s barely any time to “write a critical analysis of Indian art” or to “write a poem or rap about the importance of religious tolerance” — specially with so many details to remember. Just try recalling the specifics of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 or reservation policy from 1867 to 1887 while remembering all the military’s “Religious Accommodations” — from the Native American Sage-Burning Peyote Dance Chants to Pagan/Wiccan seasonal observances to Santeria Animal Sacrifices — not to mention (and I’m not making this up) the Branch Davidians and Church of Satan.

By the time one digests factoids such as Jews are often “overgeneralized” as “clannish, snobbish, power-hungry and greedy,” one barely has the strength to knock off reading assignments like Anne Wilson Schaef’s Women’s Reality. In this pioneering work in the field of inebrial exegesis, she asserts that the white male system is “death-oriented” and “analogous to pollution,” that women suffer from “the Original Sin of Being Born Female” and from an inferiority complex so severe it has caused a cavernous “hole in their solar plexus” that is often covered by fat; and that they or anyone else who buys into the white male system will “drop dead ahead of their time from heart attacks, strokes, or high blood pressure.”

This book prompted even one of the most ardent feminists I observed at the Institute to confide that she found it “a total piece of s   . I have nothing against man-bashing, but you might want to include some facts, some empirical research.”

That echoes the sentiment I heard most often when bringing up the entire program to your average soldier, sailor, airman or Marine outside of the Institute (those inside were a tad less candid, as all interviews had to be conducted in the public affairs officer’s office, with said officer present and taking notes on the interview). Many believe the job of Equal Opportunity Advisor undermines the command and contributes to the steady erosion of the warrior ethos. John Hillen, a national security fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, a former paratrooper and a decorated veteran of close combat, says his heavily integrated, close-knit units didn’t have much patience for equal-opportunity training. “We were busy, we were either training to kill people or we were out killing people, and that gives you a pretty unique focus that eliminates all the little artificialities that diversity’s based on.”

As evidenced by the recent closing of the Army’s Aberdeen-inspired harassment hotline (which the Army said garnered too many unwarranted, score- settling complaints), far-reaching equal-opportunity policies are often put into play simply as a media sop and as an antidote to isolated incidents — though they don’t evaporate after attention has waned. “We’ve defined harassment to mean almost anything creating a hostile atmosphere,” says Hillen. “But the military is all about a hostile atmosphere, and it’s quite constructive. From the time those suburban white kids get off the bus at basic training and are barked at by a 6’5″ black man who’s in charge of their lives, that can be hostile — and it helps very much.”

Many of the military people I spoke with called the relentless diversity focus “insulting,” “institutional intimidation,” “a joke that we’re all in on, ” with one even claiming “I could teach the damn course by now.” Another high- ranking 28-year Army veteran who has had many an Equal Opportunity Advisor ostensibly serving him, says he wouldn’t dare reject an EOA’s request to administer diversity training no matter how useless he felt it was. “You’re obligated as a commander to go through the facade of doing all this stuff,” he says, “and if you think something’s being overdone, you dare not say anything, or you’re dead meat.”

“It’s becoming like Mao’s Cultural Revolution,” says Hillen. “Everybody knows it’s built on a thousand little lies, but everybody’s waiting for someone that’s high ranking who’s not a complete moral coward to come out and say so.” And while they wait, the Institute’s forces are loosed on our services from cradle to grave as military members are grounded and pounded, sensitized, and tenderized like glistening little veal medallions.

If you are in the Air Force, you will receive some form of equal- opportunity training on Day One of basic training, and twice more during the same six weeks. The enlisted get it again at technical training school, at the NCO academy, the senior NCO academy and in every professional military course they take along the way. The same is true for officers, as it is of their progression through air command and staff college, air war college, and the general-select mandatory two-day course at the Institute (all services mandate the same for generals and equivalents). This, mind you, in addition to whatever further training an Equal Opportunity Advisor is permitted to inflict.

Navy personnel get “awareness training” throughout their careers — in petty officer indoctrination, chiefs indoctrination, prospective executive officer school, and prospective commanding officer school. It is also part of the three-day rights and responsibilities training they must attend every year.

The Army requires equal-opportunity training every six months, as well as any time a soldier goes to any Army school for any type of training. Even the Marines are not immune; a Marine spokesman told me that before a trainee ever sets foot on Parris Island, he or she receives some form of equal-opportunity training in the recruiting pool, and again at boot camp. Officers can expect five hours at pre-boot camp officers selection office and 42.5 hours at officer candidate school. Captains get 46.5 hours at amphibious warfare school. Majors get 56.5 hours at Marine Corps command and staff college. And the commander’s course for those who would be generals requires 16 additional hours. When the Marine spokesman says, “We’re at heightened awareness now,” he’s quite serious.

But not as heightened as his future Equal Opportunity Advisors back at the Institute, where the students are enacting an exercise called “BaFa, BaFa.” Two sets of students are deemed Alphans and Betans, and both are given instructions the other set doesn’t hear. The Alphans are a touchy, patriarchal culture with a king. They don’t let people approach their women, they communicate with hugs and pats, and all their discussion tends toward the achievements of their male spawn. The Betans are an aggressive trading culture, but in order to trade they can communicate only in a rudimentary language with words sounding like “Ba-Fa-Ba-Fa,” “Wee-Hee-Wee-Hee,” and so forth. They also communicate by tucking their chins to their chests, pulling their fists like a train whistle, and raising both elbows while their hands dangle.

The ostensible purpose is to prove how difficult it is to successfully operate within foreign cultures. But the message is lost as the two sides are unleashed on each other. I watch through the two-way mirror as members of the world’s finest fighting force are bleating and squawking and chin-tucking and wearing paper Burger King crowns and baby-talking and flailing their arms like injured pterodactyls. And nobody seems to mind.

Not like it would matter if they did, as one Coast Guard trainer plainly laid bare. “We have an advantage over the civilian community. If Sgt. Bryant decides she doesn’t want to play, I can go to her superior and say she doesn’t want to play. We can play, or we can go to court-martial. And you know what? Everybody plays.”

Matt Labash is a staff writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.