Racial terms have marred military forms
Words like ‘negroid’ linger despite decades-old federal directive to root them out.
A Marine Corps captain named Jahmar Resilard was one of six military personnel who were killed Dec. 6 when the F/A-18 Hornet fighter jet he was piloting collided in midair with a military refueling plane during training off the coast of Japan. Resilard, 28, was African American — a fact that is only relevant because of what happened after his death.
His mother, Joni Resilard recounted how, a few months later, after the conclusion of the crash investigation, she received in the mail her son’s death certificate. It was a painful enough experience to see the chilling document, she said. But that was only worsened when she saw how the official 2019 Defense Department form described her son’s race: “negroid,” it said — an outmoded word for classifying black people that, to the modern ear, carries racist connotations.
That form is not the only recent example of a Defense Department document containing archaic racial descriptions that are now widely seen as offensive. One is an Army Reserve regulation written in 2010 and meant to guide the service’s equal opportunity programs. The document recommended using the following designations for racial groups:
“Red (American Indian),”
“Yellow Asian”
and “Black (Negroid).”
Other examples of objectionable racial words on official Defense Department forms have come to public light in recent years. Just last year, U.S. Central Command, which oversees American forces in the Middle East, had to apologize for a pamphlet that used the term “Negro blood” in a guide for soldiers deploying to Saudi Arabia. “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 said, according to press reports at the time.
https://www.rollcall.com/news/racist-terms-marred-military-forms
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