Here’s a random observation which might be a corollary to the OP.
There are two US Army units with an obvious affinity to cold weather: The Northern Warfare Training Center in Alaska and the 10th Mountain Division in Upstate New York.
According to one source I found, about 20 percent of all active duty personnel currently serving in the US Army are black/African-American (i. e. significantly more than their share of the general US population which is about 13.2 percent). Yet when one searches for pictures of soldiers who are affiliated with the Northern Warfare Training Center and the 10th Mountain Division (I haven’t found a demographic breakdown for these units), one finds very few individuals who appear to be black, definitely much less than ⅕. The vast majority appear to be white.
Is this observation accurate? If so, what could be an explanation?
Well, no. But there was a similar level of discrimination in California and the west, and Chinese were not eligible for citizenship for most of the 19th century.
Blacks weren’t put in concentration camps in WW2. There are definitely people alive today who recall those times.
I think it’s valid to ask about the representation of other races in military roles, especially people whose ethnicity is shared by the nation’s enemies in recent or modern times.
I remember a documentary series about the training of UK Royal Marines. In one episode an otherwise outstanding candidate who was black had to leave the course because he couldn’t meet one of the key exercise standards because his leg muscles were not right in some manner. The supervising rupert supervised a friend of mine during his RM training course. My friend passed and became a combat medic.
Marcinko is a convicted felon, who was only commander of Seal Team 6 for less than three years, back in the early 80’s. Since then, he makes up stuff for his books.
Sure, he was brave and a good soldier for a while, but since then, he writes fiction.
I should clarify: most Chinese were not eligible for citizenship up to 1952. And there was certainly other anti-Chinese (and anti-everyone else who wasn’t white) discrimination (and is) much later than that.
Having said that, I don’t really have a problem with starting with anti-black discrimination and moving on from there.
The only thing I know about seal training is from television and movies, but in those scenarios, the trainees either fail to pass the requisite tests (the same for everyone) or they quit. I don’t see the opportunity for discrimination once you’re accepted to the program. Am I wrong about this?
The tests might be the same for everyone, but the training, and the associated abuse, could easily be customized by the trainers based on whatever they want.
Anecdote:
When I was in USAF attached to the US Army there was a secondary Army parachute training facility nearby. This was separate from the Army’s main one at Ft. Benning GA. There were a few slots available for local Army & USAF guys to go. But you had to qualify. Officially the test standards were hard, but objective. Run so far so fast, do X number of pushups, carry this heavy weight that far, etc. They were pass/fail. This wasn’t really a competition; if you passed you went. If not, not.
Oddly enough even though the USAF guys represented about a third of the applicants in this small pool, they got none of the slots. Somehow many of our timed pushups weren’t “good enough” and so didn’t count towards our scores. Though our pushup technique sure had been good enough to count during the two week screening / training process leading up to the final exam. Did I mention all of the scorers were Army?
And this was all white guys. Put some hyper-macho rednecky dude who doesn’t really think non-whites can be elite anything in as a gatekeeper and sure enough, those people just are aren’t elite enough to make the cut. Odd that.
Why is it assumed that the skills required to be a Navy SEAL would be universally, randomly distributed throughout the American population. Just because you take the statistics at seal school doesn’t mean that the differences happened there. Remember we’re all individuals not a group of easily dividable demographics.
I don’t know how good the access to bodies of waters or Jew-friendly civic pools was to thousands of shtetls in the Old Country, but a religious Jew is required, in Talmudic theory, to teach their son to swim.
The actual mitzvah (the commandment, like the 10 famous ones, which is non-theoretical) is that one must build a parapet around your roof. From this came an extension of the idea of safety, and the swimming thing was kicked around. (These guys were in Babylon. So maybe they’re thinking rivers.) It is the same source mitzvah that is mentioned with karate lessons and the like; recently, not in Talmud.
But part of the question arises because it is perceived (and in many cases backed with numbers) that, for instance, AfricanAmericans are way overrepresented relative to the national totals in the enlisted ranks but are still way underrepresented in SF, so how come not even a larger pool compensates. In the article quoted, the people interviewed seem to agree that a major driver in the underrepresentation is that members of these groups are not even bothering to try out to begin with. They make reference to encouraging young black officers to apply for the branch specialties that may lead to those courses. ISTM the people in charge are wondering if there’s something about what they’re doing and how they do it now, that has the effect of *discouraging *applications.
Of course with these forces there is yet another skew involved especially with the Navy and Air Force – being, well, a navy and an air force, one would think their general sample of enlistees and new commissions would be rather low in people aspiring to be be slogging it out in the dirt up close and personal to begin with. So the pool of applicants *will *be atypical relative to the whole.
BTW there is online a rather lengthy 2013 Demographics Report (PDF) on the US DoD services (excludes Coast Guard) and from what I was able to skim it looks pretty clear that the level of representation of minority groups even within the military and within branches between officer and enlisted varies significantly at any given time and between points in time (plus how you define “minority” was changed in 2010 and it seems to have especially skewed the tracking percentages for the Latino-rich Army and Marines - page 26 of the report).
Someone mentioned thrill-seeking among SF applicants. I’d hazard that one factor is that thrill-seeking young black men are more likely to have a criminal record/insufficient high school credits than their white counterparts, justly or not.
Since we are giving out anecdotes I’ll give you mine.
I was working an extra duty job at the county Votech when an Army recruiter was there. Since I’m Army and he wasn’t busy we started talking. The recruiter was a black SSG and infantry. He told me that he liked nothing better than getting young minority recruits who could use a boost out of their economic situation like he did. He also liked nothing better than getting soldiers into his beloved infantry. He said he was forced to spend time at the Votech but he felt it was a waste of time. He had much more success with middle class and upper middle class white recruits, especially to get them into the infantry or any combat arms. The black potential recruits all knew that black troops were used as cannon fodder. He had all the statistics from Vietnam that showed that was not true (the percentage of black casualties was very close to the national population and percentage of black soldiers serving). He would show them pictures of his infantry schools and units where his was one of a couple of black soldiers in a sea of white faces.
\Anecdote: My brother was EOD/SEAL 74 - 82. His best bud was Black. They started and finished training together. My father was pissed as hell that a son of his would have a black friend. Dennis was equally pissed that his father would question his friend. Took a few years but dad came around.
Wish I could ask him about percentages and quotas and tests. He’s gone now.
But I certainly never got the impression anyone would be discriminated against on account of race. You have “it” or you don’t. A Man’s a Man. A Seal’s a Seal. Money Walks, Bullshit Talks. Color was not an issue.
Don’t know how selection was done then so that may be an issue, but if you were selected, the only thing that counted was “can you cut it”.
/second hand recollections
