Veterans React to SCOTUS’ Affirmative Action Decision: ‘A Slap In the Face’
The year she graduated from the United States Military Academy at West Point, Mary Tobin was part of the largest cohort of black women in the school’s history, to that point. There were about 25, out of more than 1,000 students.
“West Point sucks for everybody,” Tobin says. But her experience had its own challenges. Among other indignities, she was taunted by a classmate who told her she was only admitted because of affirmative action; other classmates, she recalls, hung a Confederate flag for her to find the day she was in charge for room inspection.
Still, as the daughter of a student who protested to desegregate lunch counters in Nashville, Tennessee, Tobin saw her time at West Point — plus 10 years in the Army and two tours of Iraq — as her own contribution to a longer-term project of making the country a more equitable place. “I grew up with this idea that the wrongs that you see, you must address,” she says.
For Tobin, the Supreme Court’s decision on Thursday declaring affirmative action unconstitutional, while carving out an exception for military academies, was a step backwards for that project. Exempting military academies from the decision, she says, telegraphed an unmistakable message to her and other veterans from marginalized communities: This is all you’re good for.
“What that decision said to me was: It is okay for black and brown officers to be produced in these institutions of higher education for the purposes of defending and or dying for their country, if necessary. However, we do not deem it important to ensure that there is a diversity of doctors, lawyers, teachers, engineers, artists.”
More bluntly, Tobin, a board member of the Black Veterans Project, says: “We’re good enough to get into institutions where we might have to die for this country. But we’re not good enough to get into institutions that can train us to save the lives of black and brown families and children.”
By exempting the nation’s military academies, like West Point, from its decision, the Court’s conservative majority acknowledged that the government has a compelling interest in the racial diversity of military leadership, while insisting it has no interest in diversifying other kinds of leadership.
For Lindsay Church, executive director of Minority Vets, the message was clear. “All of this is just continuing to prove that people are expendable. It’s not about actually ensuring true equity,” Church says, adding that the decision is another example of “how we have continued to pillage the resources of black and brown communities…We’ve been over-recruiting in these communities to begin with — especially for the lower enlisted ranks.”
Church said she agreed with Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who declared in a searing dissent: “The Court has come to rest on the bottom-line conclusion that racial diversity in higher education is only worth potentially preserving insofar as it might be needed to prepare Black Americans and other underrepresented minorities for success in the bunker, not the boardroom.”
In Tobin’s view, the Court’s decision “is a slap in the face of my mother’s service to this country, as well as my service… It is incredibly insulting to the millions of black veterans who have served this country voluntarily— because they believed in the promise of this country.”
“It is pretty tough sometimes to live in a country that you love so much you would die for, but it doesn’t love you back,” she says. “It’s really, really tough to swallow that.”
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