Freshman House Republican Eli Crane of Arizona, a navy veteran, just discovered that it’s okay to say “people of color” in the chambers of Congress but a deep offense to say “colored people.” Obviously, the two terms have an identical literal meaning. No one cares of you describe your bathroom as having blue tiles or tiles of blue. The difference here is nuanced and based on the what terms people are willing to self-apply as well as the history of the term “coloreds” or “colored people.” If you get too committed to these semantic distinctions, you wind up being a poster child for critics of political correctness. When challenged, Crane immediately requested that his words be replaced by “people of color” in the congressional record. But that didn’t stop the criticism or prevent the Washington Post from writing an article about the incident.
Needless to say, Crane’s unfortunate choice of words is not what people should discussing. He was in the process of defending an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) that “would prohibit the Defense Department from ‘considering race, gender, religion or political affiliations or any other ideological concepts as a sole basis for recruitment, training, education, promotion or retention decisions.’”
Crane’s amendment passed the Republican-controlled House on a 214-210 vote. The NDAA later passed 219-210. This means Crane’s anti-affirmative action amendment will become law unless it is stripped out by the Democratically-controlled Senate in the conference committee that will reconcile the House and Senate versions of the bills.
Crane argued that the military is weakened when it recruits, trains or promotes people of color in the pursuit of having a diversified force. When we do this, he argued, we don’t get “the best of the best,” and he said the military in not supposed to be an inclusive organization. Trying to make it so amounts to a damaging social experiment.
The House Republicans uniformly agreed with his position. It’s the policy that matters. It’s part of the white nationalist agenda, dressed up to be about fairness and preparedness. Focusing on his choice of words distracts from this and essentially gives all his colleagues a pass.
Are National Security Democrats a thing? Because this is not just a political issue; it’s a national defense issue. Armies reflect the cultures they come from. (See, for example, David Hackett Fischer’s “Washington’s Crossing” on the differences among the British, Hessian, and American armies during the Revolution.)
And those armies reflect the strengths and weaknesses of those cultures. Multi-ethnic, multi-racial democracies tend have armies where soldiers take greater initiative, where units have *greater* cohesion precisely because they’d had to work through their differences.