Two decades ago, the federal government issued a directive ordering departments to use modern racial terms, but the Department of Defense continued to use racially offensive language on some forms as recently as last year.
The discovery was made after Marine Capt. Jahmar Resilard was killed in December 2018 in a mid-air collision. When his mother Joni Resilard received his death certificate, it listed her son’s race as “Negroid.”
“No parent wants to look at a death certificate of their child,” Resilard told Roll Call. “But then to see how they were still using a term of race classification dating back to the 1920s — that was a slap in the face, considering what he had done for his country. I was so offended by it, I actually cried again, in addition to learning of my son’s tragic death.”
Resilard contacted Democratic Rep. Alcee Hastings of Florida about the matter, and on April 1, the Defense Department removed the term “Negroid” from the military death certificate forms, replacing it with “black or African American.”
That form is not the only Defense Department document that contained outdated racial terminology, according to an investigation by Roll Call.
An Army regulation written in 2009 and titled “Criminal Investigation Activities” was updated as recently as 2014 and contained descriptors like “red” to refer to Native Americans and “yellow” to refer to Asians. Additionally, U.S. Central Command apologized for a pamphlet in a guide for soldiers deploying to Saudi Arabia that used the term “Negro blood” last year.
“The population of the [Kingdom of Saudi Arabia] is mainly composed of descendants of indigenous tribes that have inhabited the peninsula since prehistoric times with some later mixture of Negro blood from slaves imported from Africa,” it read.
In June, the House Armed Services Committee adopted an amendment to the 2020 defense authorization bill that would necessitate the Defense Department to review all of its documents for racially offensive terms.
The amendment was based on a bill filed by Hastings and would mandate the defense secretary to identify every document that contains “a term or classification that the Secretary determines may be considered racially or ethnically insensitive” and report back to Congress.
The fact that the term “Negroid” was still found on death certificates so long after the Office of Management and Budget ordered them to be supplanted, “calls into question the status of thousands of other forms currently in use,” Hastings said.
According to a Pentagon spokeswoman, Elissa Smith, a total of 1,237 forms (94%) have been reviewed in search of outdated or racially offensive terms. She said no such terms were discovered other than the Army form, which had “an issue relating to ethnicity.” Smith added that another 77 documents still have to be reviewed.
Despite that, Pentagon officials reportedly told congressional staff that they oppose requiring the military services to review all of their documents and forms, noting that there could be up to 10,000 to comb through and would amount to an administrative burden.
The military services were “advised” to review the forms but not required, according to Smith.
