Diversity Thursday

What happens when you have a Navy segregated by race? What happens when roadblocks are created to prevent equal treatment in spite of race, creed, color, or national origin?

Does the Navy prosper when Sailor are seen, treated, recognized, and rewarded the same? Not white, black, brown, yellow, or any mix - but just Navy Blue?

Or, is the best path to take - the one that the Navy's branch of the Diversity Industry - our Diversity Bullies and their fellow travelers - want us to take? Divide, and encourage division. Demonstrate through your words and actions that you do not treat Sailors as Sailors - but as representatives of their ethnic groups?

Well - here is a test case. A different time, a different context - but something to ponder.

Gregory A. Freeman has a book out discussing the 1972 race riots on the USS KITTY HAWK (CV-63), Troubled Water: Race, Mutiny, and Bravery on the USS Kitty Hawk.

With more than 5,000 sailors living and working on board, aircraft carriers have been described as floating cities. Being an American city in 1972 meant being part of a major social upheaval, as tensions broiled over civil rights, discrimination, and the war in Vietnam, and the Kitty Hawk was no exception. Although the U.S. military had been officially de-segregated more than two decades earlier, most black and white sailors still kept separate berths, and rarely mingled in the ship’s maze of passageways and compartments. Despite the presence of a black executive officer (XO), the ship’s second-in-command, many black sailors felt they were dealt harsher punishments and menial assignments because of their race. Many of them struggled to reconcile their roles as members of the Navy with their identities within the black power movement.

On October 12th, the pressure burst. With shore leave curtailed and tours extended in support of Operation Linebacker, tempers were already frayed; a racially-fraught confrontation between several black sailors and the ship’s Marines sparked an explosion of violence that caught the ship’s command unprepared, leading to several hours of rioting. In Troubled Water, Freeman weaves together the eyewitness accounts of the captain, XO, and several crew members to reveal the causes of the riots, the chaos unfolding, and the bravery that finally brought the violence to an end.

Gregory A. Freeman has won over two dozen awards for his writing, including the Sigma Delta Chi Award for Excellence from the Society of Professional Journalists. He is also the author of Lay This Body Down: The 1921 Murders of Eleven Plantation Slaves and Sailors to the End: The Deadly Fire on the USS Forrestal and the Heroes Who Fought it.

You can listen to the whole thing here via the Pritzker Military Library. I encourage you to listen to the whole thing. It will help you understand why Diversity Thursday exists. Why I have no tolerance for the cancer that exudes from Millington and the CNO's office. It is important to understand 1972 - but 2010 is not 1972.

Here is a short clip though in case you don't have the time.