Sea Control - Sea Control 342 - The Navy, in Black & White with John Cordle & Reuben Keith Green

Episode Date: May 5, 2022

Links1. “The Navy, In Black and White,” by CAPT John Cordle and LCDR Reuben Keith Green, USNI Proceedings, February 2022.2. “Revisiting the Navy’s Beard Policy, With an Eye Toward Inclusion,��� by CAPT John Cordle, USNI Blog, July 22, 2021.3. “The Case for Renaming the USS John C. Stennis,” by LCDR Reuben Keith Green, USNI Proceedings, June 2020.4. “Shut Up and Listen: Leadership Means Listening,” by CAPT John Cordle, USNI Blog, August 10, 2017.5. “Study Finds Beard Waivers Slow Promotion, Mostly Affecting Black Airmen,” by Oriana Pawlyk, July 15, 2021.

Hey, folks, it's Jared. Andrea Howard is your host today, and she's joined by Dr. John Cordell and Ruben Keith-Green for a discussion on culture and policy issues surrounding race in the Navy. This episode was edited and produced by Marie Williams. We are still looking for additional audio editors, and we're happy to provide you some very basic training materials and instruction in a low-stress environment. So if you're interested in finding a way to contribute to SimSec and add to your resume and personal skill set, please send us an email with your resume to ccontrol.simsec.org. Finally, I want to take the opportunity to recommend our partners in the SimSec Podcast Network, The Village Pumps. You can find Alex, Jamie, Drack, and a pile of iron brew bottles wherever you download your podcasts. And on that note, I'll turn it over to Kimber's men.

You're listening to Sea Control, hosted by the Center for International Maritime Security. Greetings, sea warriors. Let's dive, dive back into sea control. I'm Andrea Howard, and today we're discussing topics from several articles published by Captain John Cordell and Lieutenant Commander Reuben Keith Green. The links for the pieces will be provided in the episode footnotes. We are so lucky to be joined by the authors of these tremendous works to include the Navy in black and white and proceedings in February 2022, revisiting the Navy's beard policy with an eye toward inclusion in the USNI blog in July 2021, and the case for renaming the USS

John C. Stennis in proceedings in June 2020. John Cordell is a retired Navy captain who commanded two ships, the USS Oscar Austin, DDG-79, and San Jacinto, CG-56, and closed his career as chief of staff for Commander Naval Surface Force Atlantic. Keith Green rose from high school dropout to executive officer before writing a memoir, Black Officer, White Navy, detailing his experiences with leadership and racism in the U.S. Navy. As a reminder, all opinions expressed are personal opinions and are not representative of the institutions with which we may be otherwise associated. Thank you so much for joining us, John and Keith. Gentlemen, so to kick us off, I'd love for you to tell me about the circumstances of how you met and how your

relationship has flourished since then. John, I'll have you kick us off. okay um well i met uh keith through a linkedin post where uh you know if you get to if you follow keith or get to know him he posts a lot of uh really interesting stories about black history and things that are very educational and sometimes a bit uncomfortable and uh and he did that and someone kind of hit back at him pretty hard that i felt was unfair uh and i blocked that person before i did i wrote him a nice note that said i'm this is why i'm blocking you um and uh keith that earned me a like from keith and then the next thing you know we had connected and uh we got to talking and then uh he sent me a copy of his book uh black officer white navy and uh i read it and

it was like a punch in the gut because having served 30 years in the navy um i kind of thought i knew how it was for everybody and uh when i read about his experiences i just realized how many things I had missed out on not because I wouldn't I don't know well maybe because I wasn't paying attention but because no one made me pay attention so I've learned a lot from him over the years we've collaborated on some things and become friends but that's how we met in the first place was through LinkedIn. Keith do you have anything to add there in regards to the meeting or how your relationship with John has developed what have you appreciated about the interactions you've shared. Yes, I had been aware of John long before he reached out to me because I'd been following

some of his writings for years. And so I knew who he was. And once we got to talking, it was apparent to me that he was a very unique individual. He was receptive to information that he had not considered before, and he was open-minded, and if I brought up an issue, he was willing to, instead of dismiss it out of hand, he was willing to do what most people aren't doing, which is do some research and learn about the topic, and so we became closer in terms of understanding issues from my perspective and from his perspective, and we started putting our heads together and putting words on paper, and that's worked out very well for me. Certainly. Thanks for providing that context, Keith, of your relationship. I want to dive into some of the statistics

of the works that you've written. In your joint article, The Navy in Black and White, you wrote that proceedings in May 2020 published a list of the 240 Navy flag officers to include a total of eight black officers out of 240, or 3.3% for a demographic that makes up 13% of the U.S. population and 7.5% of all Navy officers. There were 23 female faces. That is about 10 percent, while women represent just over 50 percent of the population and 18 percent of the Navy officer corps. So Keith, what would you highlight as the major reasons behind these disparities in numbers? Well, one of the reasons is there's a smaller pool of available talent in the Black community that would qualify for service as an officer in the military

by virtue of the fact of a lack of college education due to lack of funds, etc. And the ones that do qualify, they're highly qualified, are sought after by corporations and organizations, which can pay them more money without the stress of military service. So that's part of it. And the other part is once you become an officer in the military, particularly in the Navy, it's a constant battle to be treated with respect in many cases, you know, to be treated as an equal to some of your white peers. I had a Navy lieutenant contact me, and he told me that every time he tried to talk about race or racial issues with some of his fellow officers in the ward room, they would lecture him and tell him it wasn't like that. And he said it was like walking

a tightrope. When you try to wade into these waters, you fall off the tightrope, and then you have to pick yourself back up. Admiral Sinclair Harris described about the 10-year point as death valley for Black officers. They have to ask themselves, am I willing to put up with this for another 10 years? Or do I go out into corporate America and make some money and leave some of the stress behind? And that's where a critical point is for a lot of officers. They just decide they've had enough. I had the maintenance officer tell me for the squadron I was in, I ran into him after I published my book and we were talking and he said, we ate our young back then in the surface Navy. And that was particularly true for particularly true for

black officers john do you have any discrete stories that might mirror the experiences that keith had uh you know just just a couple thoughts you know you talk about the numbers there and uh you know to make as keith said to make admiral you have to make captain to make captain you have to make commander and so it's not something that can be fixed overnight and uh i think you know One of our articles a while ago was about the promotion board photographs that they that they took away as a result of Task Force One Navy. And there was a comment that when they took those away, they actually saw a decrease in the diversity of the selection boards from Admiral Nowell in an article in the Military Times. So, you know, that makes you wonder, OK, what else is wrong with the system? So we remove the picture. And actually, that seems to have acted as a counterweight to some other sort of bias in the system.

So maybe it's the fitness reports, the awards, you know, just as Keith pointed out, just the perception of minority officers just makes it tougher. And then once you've missed that mark at a particular milestone, lieutenant, lieutenant commander, there's no way to catch up, right, because it's up or out. So we can even we could fix the entire issue today and it would take 20 years for it to show. Right. And you've hinted at these subtleties that can translate across things like fitness reports and awards, even on the day-to-day interactions. You know, people who are in a war dream or sailors on a boat notice when their leadership is more likely to interact more intimately with personnel who look like them or act like them or come from a similar background. So you're hinting at these systemic issues. And given that you've mentioned that these issues are so universal, why do you think that there has been resistance to Black junior officers or Black sailors sharing their experiences? Keith, I'll start with you. Part of it is because of the reception that they get. There's a lot of denial out there. When I wrote my book, I was hoping that the Navy would embrace it. Here's a guy that's willing to lay it all out and explain what it was like from E1 all the way up to 04 and various, various jobs.

But I did not get that reception. I was accused of bashing the Navy, et cetera, et cetera. When all I was doing is just describing what had happened to me at various times in my career. A lot of people have approached me and just done this outpouring of stories about what had happened to them. But when I ask them, are you willing to write about your experiences, they go silent and they sort of disappear. So I think there's a big fear of retaliation for telling those stories. It is one of those things that unless you're willing to write it down, because you can say something to someone, and the Navy didn't do written stories. they interviewed people and then summarized it, summarized it through the lens of the person that had heard the stories, whereas the Air Force had people write their own experiences. And I can imagine there's just a tremendous wealth of separate categories of discrimination and racism that are in that 27,000 pages. You could probably break those down into categories and come up with

some uh topics that needed to be addressed just like they did in the 1980s thanks so much for that keith john do you think that there are additional factors that would prevent people or encourage them not to share their stories um i think keith hit it uh you know it's interesting when um one of the things about hanging out with keith is i've heard him described by some senior folks as divisive and uh and and things i hear some senior officers uh and senior navy folks say, well, it's better than it was. And then I talked to the junior officers of color and they kind of tell me it's not better than it was in a lot of areas. You read some stuff by Desmond Walker, a couple other very telling stories. And then I was interviewing some folks

one day and one of the young senior enlisted said, you know, when you're being discriminated against, it's really not in your best interest to point that out to the person who's doing the discriminating. Um, it just puts a target on your back. So, um, I'm not saying that it's everywhere. I'm not saying that it's, uh, you know, uh, always on purpose, but, uh, they feel it when they, when they stand up and, uh, and at some point you make a choice. It's my family, it's my income. Uh, do I just suck it up and press on to the valley of death as, uh, as Keith said, or do do I lead? Right. You know, pointing out bias from people above you can undermine your ability to be an agent for change and the fact that you might have a target on your back. So, John,

you alluded to the change in board photos that didn't actually have the positive effects that leadership was anticipating in selection for higher rank and promotion. So, Keith, can you talk a little bit actually about the role of confirmation bias in board deliberations outside of even just the context of board photos well first of all a lot of times black officers are assigned collateral duties that are race specific and it's been proven through studies there have been naval postgraduate school studies that have shown that officers use different wording to describe black officers in their fitness reports than they do white officers some of those magic buzzwords don't get used in some of the black officers fitness reports and there was a a phrase

that i used to hear a lot damning with faint praise that was uh used uh you cannot necessarily you will not necessarily be um um denigrated in your fitness report but you aren't receiving those those uh descriptive buzzwords those accolades and i forget who it was but maybe it was one of the cno's i think it was um uh i forget which one but he said ducks pick ducks officers tend to gravitate toward those that look like them and it's also been proven that um when people see a picture of a black person there is a visceral negative reaction it's involuntary but blackness is associated with negativity and danger in the minds of many people including black people so it's a combination of things but all of those things accumulate over time and if you don't

have a picture of the person in front of you you may not be aware of some of the background of that individual that you would not take into consideration just from looking at his paperwork his fitness report john have you experienced some of those wording particularities in fitness reports and are there other factors too that could contribute to confirmation bias and board deliberations? You know, I can't specifically say that I have. I think, you know, as again, Desmond Walker recently pointed out, you know, the way we write fitness reports is perhaps something that could be looked at as far as what words are chosen. I mean, I've even heard things like, you know, you can't say command at sea, you have to say major command at sea, you know,

little nuances where it's not written down anywhere. And yet people sort of read stuff between the lines so um no i haven't seen it i will say that i was talking to one very senior officer that uh was watching you know he was not caucasian and he looked at a lot of his peers and uh and all of his peers were being promoted to higher star levels until he realized that there was nobody up there that wasn't you know caucasian and so it's a sponsorship issue sometimes it's not necessarily the words it's who's on the board and what's their background you know that The Ducks Pick Ducks was actually broader than that. It was a research project that specifically called out the Navy. It says they pick flag officers that look like themselves.

And so when you look around the room, it goes to, you know, I know there's efforts to improve the diversity of the boards, members themselves and board recorders and things like that. But again, none of this is on purpose. It's just sort of something you have to pay attention to. You know, being a woman on a submarine has some parallels to the discussion that we're having. And, you know, I can give the example of sort of ducks picking ducks or ducks at least seeing positive quality and younger ducklings. You know, when some of the male officers in our wardroom would have more emotional chats or would raise their voices, it was oftentimes seen as confidence building measures or just the way that they communicated. But if women in kind did something similar or engaged with one of those men, then we would be called emotional or it would get kind of undue attention relative to what would happen normally when the boys who did it so much more frequently would let it, you know, slide by through the eyes of others. So when you talk about day-to-day interactions and you're a minority person on your platform, there are these different attributes that are valued among the white male majority of officers and sailors, but are viewed as negative in minorities. Can you give examples of this phenomenon for you, Keith, and talk about how you might address it with senior officers?

I once had a cruiser captain uh tell me point blank you need to watch how you talk to senior officers so I said sir excuse me uh I'm not sure I understand what you mean I said did I say something uh improper or to offend you he said well it's just your bedside manner so what he was uh addressing was my assertiveness he was wrong his ship was wrong and i was a training officer was pointing out to him the things that they needed to improve on that was my job but he didn't like the tone of voices i was using when i was just describing what had happened so i've often been called out for being uh arrogant when in when if i were a white guy behaving the same way i'd be assertive and you know a hard charger go get her

So attributes that are praised in other people tend to take on negative connotations for me. That's one example. Do you think that it is a reflection of that person being uncomfortable because of the differentness? Do you think it's more of a threat because of these biases maybe or a fear of people that are not like them? Do you think that the reaction that you're getting from a senior officer in that situation is a reflection of a more mild discomfort or of a more almost fear of being replaced by somebody who is other than them or is not, you know, as John was saying, of their duckling squad? i think it's a combination of a lot of those things i have been accused of being intimidating

i have been accused of uh um being harsh when i'm just explaining stuff that's happening but one of the things there was this in 60 minutes to the story about a one of an air force fighter pilot who's getting out of the military and he said he had to constantly try to make himself smaller and less intimidating. And one of his peers pulled him aside and told him, you're big, you're Black, and you have a deep voice. If you don't take care of those things, you're not going to make it in this organization. Now, I don't know how you stop being big. I don't know how you stop being Black. And I don't know how you stop having a deep voice. But I had all three of those attributes myself. So sometimes it's a fear of being replaced. Sometimes it's feeling like

someone is stepping out of their place. A lot of white officers in the military have very little association with Black people as equals or as peers until they join the military. So part of that is a culture shock on both sides. I grew up in San Diego. I grew up in Navy towns. I'd been around white people all my life. So I never felt the need to make myself smaller or put myself in a box when dealing with people. I just dealt with people, you know, individually. But a lot of Black people, I had a guy, he retired as a rear admiral. He told me he went to a historically Black college when I was going to department school he was getting out of the navy and he told me he said Keith I went to a segregated college he said I was in a segregated neighborhood he said I never had

to deal with white people before he said they just ate me alive he said I just couldn't take it and he went out into the reserves and became this superstar in the reserve navy he was the same guy he was just treated differently in one place than another so it's a combination of things that's a great description of kind of the broader context and the broader just environment in which people who are different are operating in a navy that doesn't necessarily reflect the breakdown of society john i want the perspective from you of how you feel about senior officers that say the statement and hearing narratives like keith is sharing and saying a statement like i'll never understand what you're going through? Yeah, that's a great question. If I can back up,

just wanted to jump on something that Keith brought up about, you know, comfort zones. In the article, we describe our backgrounds, it's all the way back to high school and stuff. And, you know, one of the, as I was talking to Keith, I realized how strange this sounds, but I grew up in a small town in North Georgia, it was very much, you know, black and white. But both sides of town were kind of different and so i drove from the from the uh more affluent side of town to a private school on the other side of town this is 1980 it's like little i probably shouldn't even 1980 you were probably your parents weren't even born yet andrea but uh um i uh i'm driving through in this 1962 rash nash rambler station wagon with a confederate flag front license plate and the

stripper that says eat more possum on the back completely oblivious to the fact i'm driving through parts of town where that flag might be offensive to others and uh because i just never had any interaction with them i went to a school i pulled up my high school yearbook the other day it looks kind of like the proceedings flag officer list right except there's no black people in it um and so i just didn't have a conversation with a black person until i was 18 i went to the naval academy and then there was only one in my 90 person company so uh uh carl darden he's a good friend of mine but i learned so much but if you don't have those conversations then you don't know what you're missing. You know, it's kind of like when I learned German and then started

speaking to Germans is I met a whole group of people that I just would never have been able to communicate with if I hadn't learned their language. And so it's almost the same thing. Does that make sense? That totally makes sense. Yeah. I mean, the onus is on the senior officers to reach out and have those conversations. On the topic of prompting these conversations up and down the chain of command, the Navy created Task Force One Navy. Keith, can you talk about its objectives and if you feel like it's doing a sufficient job in addressing some of the issues we've discussed today. I think for what the tasking was, they did an outstanding job. I told several members of the task force and also a member of the Department of Defense that it really

doesn't matter what your report says because I've read them all over the years. And if you're not going to address directly the everyday racism that people experience, nothing's going to change because no one sees that there's any accountability for doing the behaviors that they were doing before the Task Force One Navy report came out. Nowhere in the Task Force One Navy report does it offer any guidance to people that are experiencing racism and discrimination and sexism and harassment and anti-Semitism that's been reported in Reuters and the AP. I wrote an article about the perpetual racism in the United States Navy and gave some guidance on the Admiral Hayward cracked down on drug abuse in the 1980s because it was rampant and we were losing people.

There was damage. People were showing up high on aircraft carriers and all sorts of stuff. He cracked down on that with both feet. I lived through that. If the Navy would crack down on racism and discrimination in the same way that they did drug abuse, we can start to turn this around. But there really does appear to me, based on all the information, the input I've got from various people in the fleet, and my observations and reading over the years, nothing's going to change until there becomes a period of accountability. People have to be held accountable for violating the law and abusing people. Certainly. Talking about this history of trying to combat discrimination in the Navy.

John, can you talk to me about C&L Zumwalt's Z-Gram number 66 and how the Navy could have better implemented its vision back then? Sure. If I can back up just one thing, Andrea, I'm curious about your question before where you said, I'll never understand what you're going through. You're the one that brought that into the conversation. You probably can't attribute that to anyone, but what prompted that question?

Because I have an answer to it, but I'm curious what brought it to the forefront. The context that brought it to the forefront was the aftermath of the riots in 2020 on my boat and a comment made to the one black chief that we had in our chief's quarters which was along the lines of hey chief how are you doing I could never understand what you're going through and the chief opened up to me about the fact that he found that to be incredibly othering and that instead of putting in the work and asking questions of that chief and finding out how he really was responding and finding out sort of the longer narratives of discrimination that he had felt or times of othering that he had felt in the Navy. Instead,

the chief felt very dismissed because those questions weren't being asked by the senior officer. No, that's great. I mean, I read that and I'm like, gosh, I would never say that, you know, and certainly not out loud. You know, it's kind of like when you say, well, that's not in my lane. You know, if you're a leader, it's in your lane because it affects one of your people. And, you know, one of my articles I'm most proud of is one called Shut Up and Listen, which is leadership means listening. And basically it says, hey, ask that person what's bugging them and then stand by because something's bugging them and you have to learn. And it goes to empathy. Right. So anyway, I just thought that was kind of interesting. But thank you for explaining that. And now I forgot your question.

The question was if you could talk about Sino Zumwalt's Z-RAM 66 and the ways in which it could have been implemented more effectively. I'll probably defer to Keith because he's made a life history of that Z-gram, but I went back and read it again because of the question. And two things struck me. Number one, it was blunt, right? It was like, hey, we're going to do this, this, this, and this, and here's why, which is something that's been a long time since I've seen anything written that way in that style. And number two, it also established some very discrete metrics and measures of, hey, here's how we're going to know whether we've made progress. And then I think if you read the history of the Z grant, he actually put that out and then eventually didn't feel like there was progress. So we hired someone to come in and sit next to him to help do that. And and then followed up with some other guidance by calling all the flags together and say, you know, kind of a you guys come around to say, here's what I meant when I said what I said.

but uh it's just the kind of thing that it struck me for just its simplicity um and its directness keith yeah great i'll have you pass the mantle over keith and if you can add to just the how looking forward today how the the narrative of changing the name of the john c stennis fits into the same line of progression and change well z gram number 66 was written by zoom waltz Minority Affairs Assistant, Lieutenant Commander William S. Norman, Bill Norman. And I didn't know the backstory until I read Larry Berman's biography, Zumwalt, but Norman fought mightily to keep that from being watered down. People thought it was too aggressive, too direct, too moving too fast, excuse me, moving too fast. So Bill Norman actually wrote that Z-gram.

and everything john described is is uh completely accurate um one of the things that zoom walt discussed in his memoir was racist call signs and racist insignia on aircraft and on aircraft squadrons he showed in the picture one of his uh photos in the book it showed a picture of a navy aircraft and it had a black guy in in a bathtub scrubbing himself and under that was detachment meant jig, which is a racist term. So this has been around forever. And I was very distressed when I learned that an aircraft carrier is being named for John C. Stennis, who I learned about in Zumwalt's memoir, On Watch, how he tried to derail the initiatives that Zumwalt was putting forward because of what he learned from Bill Norman and groups of officers and enlisted people about the

difficulties that black people were and their families were facing in in the uh in the military i i don't see how the navy can in good conscience keep the name of john c stennis on an aircraft carrier after everything that's been revealed about him i read the uh phd dissertation about uh his efforts to uh uh support segregation and further white supremacy i mean it was a lifelong thing for him all the way back to um well it's in the article that i wrote but it's uh i think it would be a slap in the face after having talked about all these changes they were going to make and then continue to allow someone uh to be honored in that way and if you if you pull into a port and someone looks up and sees the uss john c stennis and does a quick google

search they would ask themselves why would why on earth would the navy name a ship after someone with a reputation like that and a record and that's a question i've been asking for 25 years yeah thanks so much for that historical narrative i certainly hope that the initiatives to hopefully change the name of the stennis do get pushed through i'm going to pivot because we're talking about links to you know the name stennis in the navy there's also been a link regarding facial hair and a quote degradation of standards in black officers and black sailors who are serving so there's a statistic in one of your articles it says 60 percent of african-american men as well as other people with curly hair have razor bumps or PFB, which can cause scarring over

time. John, can you tell me about the link between this, quote, degradation of standards and a lifetime medical condition, particularly if there are ways to rectify that while in short duty? Well, Keith could and sort of has written a book about this. But when you talked about our introduction, things we've learned from each other, I've been twice commanding officer. I have signed dozens, if not hundreds of chits and proudly demanded, you know, no shave chits from sailors that had beards.

Never thinking about what they did to their to their self-esteem, to their psyche, to their their feeling of inclusion because I'm white. I never had to deal with it. I didn't understand it. And it's amazing to me still today how much credibility we put in the idea, connection between a little bit of facial hair and professionalism and uh it's almost ridiculous if it wasn't so uh tragic and so uh um keith educated me on the on the on the disease um i found misconceptions such as uh oh it's just temporary well it's only temporary if you don't shave um it's uh it you can get laser surgery well sure you can't an elective surgery if it can you can never grow a beard for the rest of your life it may change the pigmentation on your face But what really it does is you look at the statistics. This is a group of people that we are trying like crazy to get into the Navy and to keep in the Navy.

And then we establish this us and them relationship every time someone gets asked for a chit. I was talking to a white officer the other day that has a beard who said he gets asked at least once a week by everyone from chiefs to captains. Hey, what's up with the beard? How come? You know, so here's this person who's been in the Navy for 10 years. Everything he's done amounts to, hey, what's up with the beer? And it's just wrong. And so there's a safety issue, perhaps. The Navy is looking into that at the direction of SECNAV. But that's not the point. It's about inclusion of a group of people, maybe not by direct, you know, intent. But, you know, two questions I've asked Keith and his answer still resonated with me. One was back to the status is a segregationalist, a racist.

His answer to me was. Think about you asking me that question, how ironic that is. Right. I'll just leave it at that. Secondly, my question was, is it is a policy that has discriminatory impact? Is it a discriminatory policy? And he said it is if you're on the other end of the discriminatory policy. And so, yes, right. But it took me 60 years to figure that out. And it was by listening to people like Keith. So I hope that I applaud the changes that came about recently. And, you know, stated that publicly, but I don't think that addresses the cultural elephant in the room, where people still feel put down. And I'm not going to stick around an organization where I feel put down. Yeah, Keith, I'd love to hear your thoughts on the subject as well. Well, I lived through it. I watched my father pick at his face long after he got out of the Navy. He had ingrown hairs. He had scar tissue. And I thought, man, that's awful. I would never want to go through that. And I started going through it in boot camp. When I went to officer candidate school, I had been wearing a beard, authorized beard, for most of my Navy career. But when I started at OCS, I had to start trying to shave every day.

And it was awful trying to shave over those bumps because of the hairs that had grown into my skin. So I tried using a depilatory powder, which I used in the past. And I wound up getting chemical burns all over my face because those open bumps and sores soaked up those chemicals and just took the skin right off my face. So it is almost torture to try to force someone to shave over a face that looks like that. And every time you cut that hair, you put a sharp point on it, and it just curls right back into the skin. They can grow up to an inch or more inside your face, which I've shown. I've been on ship and called one of my shipmates over, one of my fellow wardroom mates over and said, I want you to watch this. And I used a toothpick and I lifted a hair out of my face that was about an inch, an inch and a half long.

And they're standing there trying not to vomit because they just can't imagine having that happen to them. But it is not an insignificant thing to walk around all day with your face burning because, you know, it hurts and it's on fire. And Andre, if I could just pile on a little bit. One thing I didn't mention is the long term impact. So Emily Wong and a group of Air Force dermatologists published a study back in May of 21, military medicine, about the impact. They actually did their own research about the impact of promotion on promotion of Air Force people with beards. And they draw the connection between the percentage of African-Americans is like of the people that have beards, like 85 percent were African-American. And so rightly or not, it singled out this group. But the promotion rates were significantly impacted. uh and there was a statistically significant difference um uh of six months to a year

behind their peers and as ruth as keith pointed out that adds up if i'm late to e5 then i'm going to be late again to e6 and somebody's going to start asking why are you late to promote well okay they're going to get a bad fit reps now you promote later so we're driving people out um and uh and i've heard one person say well that was the air force uh you know we haven't done that study in the navy you know i mean come on um so i asked emily i said why did you do the study she said, you know, John, I'm a dermatologist for the past 20 years. I always heard these stories about people being insulted, denigrated, denied promotion, denied opportunity for selection to different assignments, like flag officer aides and things like that. And at first, I thought it was

just people complaining, but it became such a trend that I decided to look into it. So then I went to look for funding to do the study. I couldn't get in. I requested permission to do it formally uh couldn't get permission so we just did it and uh they interviewed uh you know thousands and thousands of sailors and drew the statistics and so i know we're digging deep into this one topic but it's sort of a uh kind of a hot button for me um which is kind of weird um but again back to that story that we said at the beginning um the people that are most affected are probably the least likely to bring it up so that's where i think uh our two voices uh kind of hit a uh hopefully hit a harmony there that it'll continue to resonate over i gotta quit saying that over

you're fine some things are just have it i'm hanging around you active duty folks too much that's what i'm saying that's what i'm saying now the the beard issue i'm glad that you guys dug into this one because it is something that is more representative of you know progression that's being made forward right now but also policies that have these unintended consequences i'm glad that the Navy is looking into them more seriously and trying to take the right steps forward. Due to time constraints, I'm going to give you both one last big question,

and I hope you can take it and mold it in whatever fashion you like as your kind of closing thoughts. So I'll make it two parts, and that's how can the majority, the white male officers, serve as better allies to women and black people in the Navy?

And do you believe that the military services can ever truly be colorblind, should they? Wow. So I guess the first thing I would say is, and I think Keith would echo this, I'm not here to bash the Navy. And I'm not here to, I love that organization. And the article I write is based on a desire

to bring things to the forefront, have them discussed, and have people hash them out. And that's how you learn. What Keith has taught me is to go back and look at history. We had Black soldiers being pulled off of buses when they got back from World War II and shot in the street. We just had people convicted of murder of a black person shot in the street, not too far from where I grew up. So for those who would say, well, things are better now. OK, maybe they are.

But but it's still there. And the Navy is a demographic of people that live. They come in from the outside. So, however, we could start by education, understanding. We have leadership schools, but teach active listening, teach listening like, hey, what is bugging you? And I'm going to sit and listen to you no matter how much it hurts. for you to tell me that i wasn't listening before you know so that conversation you discussed if i couldn't understand what you're going through that should have led to about a two-hour sit down over a cup of coffee well let me help you understand you know um so that's number one um and can the navy ever be colorblind i don't think it should be uh there's so much rich history there

um of other people you know you said black and women but let's talk about hispanics and asians and and uh you know there's people that are very proud of saying hey i'm an asian american you know, Hispanic, American, uh, whatever. Um, but, uh, um, you know, let's celebrate that, but let's take time to learn about the stuff that we just didn't know. I don't know how many times I've stopped back. You know, it's like the Stennis story. Um, it's, it's a, it's a common, uh, trend is, well, I'll mention the Stennis and somebody who served on it will say, well,

I don't want to be in the ship. And I'll say, well, do you know what, do you know his background? And then I'll send the link to Wikipedia. And they'll come back and say, wow, didn't know that. Um, I'm kind of ashamed, you know? Um, and, uh, so, learn and focus on, you know, what did the CNO just say? Get real, get better. Getting real and getting better doesn't happen unless you get ugly a little bit and deal with these issues out front. So that's my two cents. I think the best way to be an ally, I'm going to echo what John said, is you have to listen

to the stories that people are sharing with you. If they don't feel that you're engaged, you're not asking questions, you're not educating yourself. I've had people constantly tell me, Well, educate me on this. Educate me on it. It's not my job to educate you. I can tell you that there's a problem. Follow John's example and go out and educate yourself. So that's what I think people should do. As far as being colorblind, I think the Navy and the Marine Corps should follow the Army's example. The Army doesn't consider itself colorblind. They consider itself color conscious because being a black person will have an impact on how other people see you. It doesn't matter. You don't have to do anything. It is people that say they're colorblind. They're just to me. I wish people would stop saying that because color does have an impact on how other people see you and sometimes on how you see yourself.

You walk into a room and you're the only black person there or you're the only minority person there that has an impact, can have an impact on how you see yourself in that room, how you conduct yourself, how you behave, the words you choose to use, whether you choose to speak up or not, if you're not being drawn in and included, that's where the inclusion thing comes in. More than once, I've had made a statement or made a suggestion in a room full of white people and had it dismissed. And then a few days later, the guy in charge of the room says, I've decided this is what I'm going to do. And it is exactly the same suggestion that I made. But when it came from me, it wasn't suitable. And I've seen all the heads in the room turn to look at me, and I just smile.

I don't care as long as we're getting the stuff done that needs to get done. But if you're not willing to accept the input from people that don't look like you, that may not think like you, you're harming your own organization. I couldn't think of a better closing thought for that. And I hope the words that both of you just spoke resonate with the people who are listening. And hopefully the folks who might come into this even with a little bit of doubt, maybe, of the severity of the situation you know those are the people that may have these unconscious biases that are preventing them from getting the best that they can from the people that are working for them unfortunately that's all that we have time to for today i just want to thank both

of my guests captain john cordell and lieutenant commander keith green for joining me and for what was a truly engaging and insightful conversation I walked up to the barrow counter Way, hey, put it in the alley There I met with Greasy Annie Put it on the shimbo now So help me, Bob, I'm puttin' in the alley Way, hey, put it in the alley

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