Racism Despite Integration: Diversity for the Sake of Mission Readiness in the U.S. Military

Abstract

Is racial justice a feasible normative aim of integration for institutions of war? Proponents have long looked to the U.S. military as an institution through which to pursue racial progress. However, its proponents have not given enough critical attention to the logics of practice that connect militarism and race. Drawing on practice-based ideology theory, I conceptualize racial militarism as an ideological formation which subsumes matters of racial difference to the principle of mission readiness. I then analyze military policies and training procedures to show how racial militarism tolerates diversity superficially, while the militarization process effectively erases social difference and enforces a practical culture of colorblindness. In the final section, I engage critiques of integration to argue that racial militarism blocks the potential for the kind of radical transformation that would be required for racially just integration in the military. Integration as racial justice is not feasible when violence and hierarchy define an institution’s practical logic.

Introduction

Advocates for racial justice have long been divided over the question of service in the U.S. military. Proponents argue that military service promotes economic mobility (Greenberg et al. 2022), proves desert of social and political recognition (Du Bois 1998, 66), and that it improves racial attitudes among service members (Anderson 2010, 125; Moskos and Butler 1996). As an institution with strict hierarchical structure, disciplinary norms, and a diverse community, the military is thought to be the state institution most capable of promoting change (Bailey 2023). Viewed over the long-term, the U.S. military appears to promote incremental progress. However, critics point to the history of racial exploitation, domination, and discrimination in and by the military, including practices of discriminatory draft selection, as reasons against service (Marable 1981; Phillips 2012). For critics, the military as an institution is only suited to reproducing the racial status quo domestically and abroad.

Due to the appeal of military socialization and culture to its proponents, I draw on theories of integration and ideology to argue that racial justice is not possible when violence and hierarchy constitute the structure and practical logic of the site of integration. Specifically, I argue that integration in the military is framed by an ideological formation I call racial militarism, which is opposed to racial egalitarianism. Jasmine Gani argues that racial militarism “operates both as a theory of civilizational supremacy and as a practice/policy of chauvinism, exclusion, and dehumanization for the purpose of enacting violence” (2021, 547). Though racial militarism is not isolated to one country, I focus racial militarism in the U.S. context, paying particular attention to anti-black racism. ¹ As scholars of racial capitalism argue, from early colonial expansion through the emergence of the military-industrial-complex (MIC), the “mission” has been to support U.S. domestic and international aims of capitalist extraction through racial domination (Gilmore 2022, 186; Davis 2003, 86; Singh 2017; Seigel 2018; Melamed 2015). Within the U.S. military, mission readiness—the ability of the military to accomplish its stated goal—is the guiding principle through which the question of race is handled (Bailey 2023, 278). ² While superficially tolerating difference for the sake of readiness, the martial habitus of racial militarism homogenizes individuals into deracialized, capable, and effective martial subjects. This process reinforces an “epistemology of ignorance” characterized by the white epistemic standpoint, which is supported by colorblind ideology (Mills 2017; Cole 2018). As a product of its own history, the everyday practices of military life as well as its explicit institutional policies and ideology are fundamentally racialized. In short, the desired benefits of integration and inclusion are frustrated because martial racial integration reproduces racist hierarchies and practices. This paper adds to the literatures on integration, militarism, and racism by identifying and explaining one of the processes involved in the reproduction of racial domination and oppression. It thus provides a new way to understand why military integration fails to meet the hopes of many supporters. It likewise contributes to the critique of the U.S. military’s current efforts to promote just relations through anti-extremism and anti-discrimination policies and training.

In the first section, I contrast the empirics of racial integration in the military with the expectations and ideals of integration in political philosophy, engaging with Roy Brooks, Tommie Shelby, and Sharon Stanley’s contributions to integration theory. I then draw on practice-based ideology theory to conceptualize racial militarism, focusing on the ways that practices and norms become embodied during the militarization process. In the third section, I develop my account of racial militarism by analyzing integration in the military at the institutional level, during recruit training, and in everyday military culture. In the final section, I return to the notion of integration as racial justice to identify the features of racial militarism that make racial justice an unfeasible aim of integration in the military.

An Inclusive Institution?

In All That We Can Be: Black Leadership and Integration the Army Way, Charles Moskos and John Sibley Butler claim that the U.S. Army “is not race-blind; it is race-savvy,” unmatched in racial integration and black achievement (1996, 71). For Moskos and Butler, the military’s commitment to diversity and meritocratic norms enables soldiers ³ to cooperate and compete on equal footing. Indeed, they argue that the future of positive race relations in the United States depends on the military model of “an absolute commitment to nondiscrimination, coupled with uncompromising standards of performance” (1996, 13). These values remain central to the DoD’s attempts to combat racism through character development.

Positive accounts of military integration often rely on intergroup contact theory, which suggests that divisive prejudices are dispelled when racially diverse soldiers come together in prolonged contact, with a shared mission, and with equal material support (Allport 1979). In other words, with proper socialization and institutional support, people learn that their stereotypes are deficient representations of others. On these grounds, Elizabeth Anderson argues that the military is:

The most integrated institution in the United States, not just by role but in the ease and comfort with which its members willingly associate across racial lines. Its members report that race relations are much better there than in civilian life. The effectiveness of the army’s integration is due to its strong institutional commitment to equal opportunity and equality in race relations, along with a large enough representation of well-trained blacks so that their presence in all ranks is taken for granted. (2010, 125)

The military displays the three important features of a diverse institution. First, equal opportunity is an institutional norm. Second, those norms interact with the empirical diversity of the military. Third, racially diverse leadership is normalized for the soldiers. For proponents of contact theory, these conditions should unsettle the assumptions that uphold racial hierarchy and reduce negative racial attitudes among soldiers.

Yet, the empirical research on racial attitudes in the military has been mixed. While some have found that military socialization reduces negative racial attitudes (Moskos and Butler 1996; Stouffer et al. 1949), others caution against too much optimism. Jennings and Markus (1977), for example, argue that military service is not associated with a change in civic tolerance, their variable for racial attitudes. Other research shows that white service members and veterans tend to hold more negative racial attitudes than civilians (Nteta and Tarsi 2015; Lawrence and Kane 1995). Not limited to racial attitudes, military service has been associated with negative attitudes toward people who identify as LGBTQ (Ender, Rohall, and Matthews 2016; Kellermann 2014; Polga-Hecimovich, Carey, and Horiuchi 2019). As such, one critic insists that the U.S. military “should not continue to benefit from its reputation as a model for effective integration,” because of its complicity in willful “blindness to the noticeable effects of identity difference” (Barnes 2007, 748).

The persistence of negative social attitudes among service members and veterans is often attributed to self-selection (Young and Nauta 2013; Ender, Rohall, and Matthews 2016; Nteta and Tarsi 2015; Kellermann 2014). Nteta and Tarsi (2015) argue that the military was relatively less racist when the Draft was in effect because more diverse racial attitudes were forcibly integrated. With the end of the Draft and the rise of the all-volunteer force (AVF), however, people with negative racial attitudes became proportionately dominant (Nteta and Tarsi 2015, 4). This view does not posit that people are more likely to join because they have negative racial attitudes; rather, as Samuel Huntington suggests, there is simply an “inherent similarity and compatibility between the military ethic and conservatism” (1985, 94). Because the politically conservative are more likely to enlist or commission, and they tend to have negative racial attitudes, these views are overrepresented within the force. If self-selection is the reason for persistent racism in the military, improving attitudes is either a matter of selective recruitment or of personal discipline and institutional disciplinary measures.

Drawing on the critiques of liberal integration—or “integrationism”—I argue that proponents of the military as a model for integration fail to account for the ways that military culture and practices reproduce racism at the structural and individual levels. With the mixed findings on integration in mind, Roy Brooks highlights the stakes: “If racial integration has failed to undo racial stereotypes or counteract racial bias, it has also failed to do much about ‘white racism,’” that is, the ideological, material, and embodied aspects of white supremacy (1996, 107). Insofar as integration has merely reproduced the status quo, then perhaps the issue is that racial justice has not guided integration and inclusion efforts (Stanley 2017). For instance, the ideal of mutually transformative integration requires white people to actively commit to the process; there is little incentive for marginalized groups to participate if the dominant group cannot be expected to follow through with their commitment to just integration (Shelby 2014; Stanley 2017). Given the difficulty of convincing dominant group members to challenge their own position and privilege, relying on integration as contact is unlikely to overcome implicit biases and defensive reactions (Brooks 1996, 106; Darby 2023, 117). The possibility of failure and the likelihood of new forms of racial domination lead strong critics to argue that integration efforts lead to new forms of control and domination (Marable 1981). Instead, they advocate self-segregation on the part of marginalized communities as a form of self-protection. While there may be disagreement about how to achieve meaningful racial justice, many scholars share the assumption that the “basic structure” needs to be reformed. And though pessimism about the possibility of racial justice through integration is warranted, it is still worthwhile to understand why model case—military integration—fails to meet the expectations of its proponents. An account of that failure is instructive well beyond the military.

Unlike the common examples of residential, busing, and school policies which focus on relatively passive forms of integration, socialization in the military is an intense, explicit, and deeply embodied indoctrination process. The military is thus well suited to promote the kinds of epistemic and normative changes that integration theorists demand for racial justice. I argue, however, that the practical logic of the space of integration should inform our normative expectations. In this case, the practical logic of militarism and militarization constrain the potential benefits of integration on racial attitudes. More broadly, thinking through racial integration and militarism together forces us to consider the broader structural conditions that construct the space of integration in the first place.

Militarism

The concepts of militarism and militarization are central to this argument. Militarism is the basic practical logic that defines the culture of the military. Though militarism has been conceptualized in myriad ways, the common feature is that the potential for violence and its legitimation structures the relationship between an individual or collective political subject and its other (Eastwood 2018). Cynthia Enloe argues that militarization is the process “by which a person or thing gradually comes to be controlled by the military or comes to depend for its well-being on militaristic ideas” (2000, 3). Following Enloe and embodied approaches to the study of war, I use militarization to mean the process of habituating or embodying norms and practices that the military uses during recruit training to produce soldiers and maintains in everyday military life (e.g., McSorley 2014; Basham 2013; B. Schrader 2019). Critics argue that militarization is often used too broadly and that misleadingly implies—at least in contemporary society—a time of peace or state of being not already affected by a posture toward war (Basham 2018; Howell 2018; Millar 2022). Accepting these criticisms, I use the concept of militarization because there is a significant difference between general exposure to military norms and practices, and the concrete practice of transforming civilians into soldiers.

Ideology and habitus

The process of militarization occurs within prevailing ideological structures. In the political theory literature, ideologies are typically defined as commonly held webs of beliefs or as social scripts that function as a worldview or to guide action (Shelby 2003; Stanley 2015; Aytac and Rossi 2022). For content-based or cognitivist theories, ideologies can be problematic due to their origin, function, or for epistemic reasons (Shelby 2003). However, content-based conceptions of ideology have been criticized for overlooking or downplaying the primacy of material conditions and social practices that produce or maintain the content (Shelby 2003; Fields and Fields 2012; Stanley 2015; Haslanger 2017; Táíwò 2018; Eastwood 2018). Rather than focusing on the propositional content of a racist ideology, then, I adopt a practice-based approach to ideology which foregrounds the relationship between belief structures, affects, and the body. I use this approach to conceptualize the practical structure of racial militarism as an ideological formation. By conceptualizing racial militarism as an ideological formation, we can better understand the ways that often conflicting ideas and practices meld to reproduce structural racism and obstruct racial progress.

Ideological formations describe the relationship between explicit ideological content, material conditions, and practices that sustain and are sustained by that content (Haslanger 2017). On this view, an ideology is a cultural technē, a semiotic framework in context of which we act and which makes our actions meaningful. Charles Mills argues that problematic ideologies “reflect and contribute to perpetuating illicit group privilege” (2017, 73). Following Mills, the functional concern here is primary: whether and how an ideology or ideological formation maintains unjust or oppressive relations. Racism is thus understood as an ideological formation rather than merely an ideology to stress the practical, material, and structural elements involved. This implies that racist institutions, unjust distributions of goods, and race-based violence emerge from but also refigure their source. Given the functional concern, I follow Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s argument that racism is “the state-sanctioned and/or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerabilities to premature death” (2022, 107).

To make the process of embodiment in ideological formations more explicit, I draw on the notion of habitus. As proposed by French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, a habitus is a “system of structured, structuring dispositions, which is constituted in practice and is always oriented toward practical functions” (Bourdieu 1990, 52). It is a system of structured dispositions in the sense that our cognitive and affective dispositions are (re)produced by the practices of our culture. These dispositions are also structuring in that they guide our actions in the world which in turn reinforce or alter our dispositions. While “the body believes in what it plays at,” embodied beliefs need not correspond to explicit beliefs (Bourdieu 1990, 73). For example, when a social structure poses bodies in habitual competition with other bodies, that relationship will itself become embodied; the world is experienced as a space of competition.

The notion of racial habitus accounts for the ways material and social practices can racialize subjects (Singh 2022). Bonilla-Silva, for example, proposes white habitus to describe the way that segregation practices result in a “racialized, uninterrupted socialization process that conditions and creates whites’ racial taste, perceptions, feelings, and emotions and their views on racial matters” (2003, 152). Yet, the scope and salience racial categories and beliefs are affected by their social context. In his ethnographic study of martial arts clubs in the United Kingdom, Amit Singh argues that the diversity and intimacy of the fighting gym “creates a social context where race is locally stripped of discursive meaning,” but are not strong enough to overcome the broader racial habitus (2022, 302). Racial militarism should thus be understood in relation to the martial habitus that shapes and maintains it as an ideological formation.

Racial Militarism as Ideological Formation

I conceptualize racial militarism as an ideological formation, supported by a particular martial habitus. ⁴ It is produced in the circulation between the military’s structural role in maintaining the state and market, its institutional goals and policies, training methods, and cultural norms for violence and exclusivity. Due to social pressure and mission necessity, the institutional policies of the military call for a multiculturalism in which diversity is welcomed, though in limited ways (Bailey 2023). The military’s official policy and educational platforms insist on a formal climate in which service members respect each other’s distinct qualities. Despite the military’s formal guidelines and messages, racism—manifested as colorblind racism, multicultural racism, and overt racism—is persistent and dynamic.

Racial militarism is distinctive because of the militarization process itself, which avowedly aims to erase difference throughout its training. Whatever a recruit’s prior dispositions toward racism, recruit training attempts to instill violent, meritocratic, and colorblind dispositions (B. Schrader 2019; Basham 2013). Material equality between recruits aids the production of social homogeneity and a culture of competitiveness (among recruits and against the “enemy”), which frames the world through a meritocratic lens. In a sense, homogenizing recruits along material and economic lines supposedly makes one’s prior group attachments irrelevant. However, as social psychologists have found, as soldiers become more sensitive to threat and in-group relations, their out-group perceptions become more negative. Likewise, cultural notions of merit and exceptionality foster similar boundary policing between in-group and out-group members. Consequently, as Lyall (2020) finds, militarization fails on its own terms when differences within the in-group become more significant than unity against the enemy. For this reason, Lyall suggests that “militaries in unequal societies are thus incubators of inequality, reinforcing rather than overturning status hierarchies” (2020, 19). Looking beyond the domestic sphere, multicultural policy attempts to instill respect for diversity while militarization creates competitive soldiers who see themselves as united against racialized enemies; this is a tension that only tightens in a world where U.S. hegemony is increasingly threatened.

Thus, while militarization aims at reducing racial difference for the sake of mission readiness through the embodiment of meritocracy and commitment to a supervenient group identity and promotes these goals through intense in-group affiliations that can blur internal racial lines, these features in turn highlight the “otherness” of out-group members. In other words, because the composition of the in-group is always in flux, there is no way to prevent these two ideologies from mixing, thus making the racialization of the “other” circulate back to reinforce the racialization of groups within the military.

A brief historical contextualization helps set the stage for my account of racial militarism. The function of race in the military shifted throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, often in response to military manpower needs (Du Bois 1998, 66; Phillips 2012; Polk 2020). Martial labor was often divided along racial lines. During the Spanish-American War, for instance, black soldiers were recruited because they were believed to possess natural immunity to yellow fever (Polk 2020, 27). Likewise, soldiers of color were often assigned to noncombat roles in logistics, hospitality, and construction because they were believed to be insufficiently masculine (Polk 2020, 4). Through the Second World War and the Cold War, the discrepancy between the U.S.’s commitment to democracy and the reality of race relations within the U.S. invited domestic and international criticism from allies and enemies alike (Phillips 2012; Dudziak 2011; Darda 2019). For instance, with the Civil Rights Movement in the United States occurring alongside the first half of the Vietnam War, soldiers and officials alike became increasingly attuned to racial disparities in the ranks. Tensions increased due to racial discrimination and disproportionate draft selection. To the displeasure of military officials, Black Power politics directed attention to the imperialistic and racist character of the Vietnam War (Maycock 2001; Phillips 2012; Bailey 2023). Moreover, increasing levels of racial violence occurring between the troops in-country forced the DoD to address the race problem.

Among the significant changes that emerged from this process were the end of the Draft and the reconsideration of recruitment practices. With the switch to an AVF the composition of the military became, in theory, a matter of personal choice (Bailey 2009). Soldiers no longer had to fight for their country; to do so became an act of will, a way to prove oneself to society as citizens. For low-income soldiers, it was also a means to economic security (Phillips 2012, 18). Not surprisingly, the military recruited extensively from low-income populations across the color-line. But as the military became worried about issues of morale and discipline, it shifted its recruitment practices from initial enlistment benefits (e.g., bonuses) to emphasizing the G.I. Bill and stricter entry requirements (Moskos and Butler 1996, 34). Joining the military signaled self-improvement. Enlistment became a sign that one willingly adopted the martial identity, thus setting aside their prior identity attachments. Though not an exhaustive account, these institutional shifts set the stage for contemporary racial militarism.

Multicultural Policy

In 1971, the military established the Defense Race Relations Institute (DRRI) to study equal opportunity issues and provide “race relations education” to the troops to reduce racial animosity. However, due to its focus on racial issues and its training methods, the DRRI was renamed in 1979. Reflecting the increased scope of its mission, it became the Defense Equal Opportunity Management Institute (DEOMI). Today, DEOMI conducts DEI research, provides DEI training, and gives policy advice to military leaders. On its website, the Institute insists that it “maximize[s] organizational cohesion and maintain[s] the highest degree of mission readiness while maintaining the DoD’s reputation as a place where all individuals have infinite dignity and worth” (DEOMI n.d.).

DEOMI's mission reflects the overarching social ideals of the military, namely, multicultural diversity. As the main organ of the military’s racial ideology, DEOMI studies the social psychological dynamics that undergird harmful prejudicial behaviors. Yet prejudicial behavior is not discouraged for its own sake, but because military success requires cooperation. In other words, diversity and inclusion for the sake of mission readiness is the common theme in DEOMI’s publications, research, and courses. Former Secretary of the Navy, Ray Mabus' acknowledges this priority: “A diverse and inclusive workforce has never been more important […]. We are stronger, more effective, and more innovative when our workforce reflects our Nation’s rich diversity and our workplace environment fosters respect, dignity, and equal opportunity” (Mabus 2016).

Emphasizing the value of diversity is a minimally progressive step, but skepticism of diversity for an end other than itself is certainly warranted. Dylan Rodriguez sharply criticizes multiculturalist white supremacy, which creates “delimited spaces of empowerment and social prestige for the racial subalterns of ‘classical’ American apartheid, while reproducing the institutionality of white life, white bodies, and white subjectivities as the socially ascendant modality of the (allegedly postapartheid) U.S. social formation” (2009, 49). The military can be read as the assimilationist “delimited space” par excellence. As the most racially diverse government institution, it offers a chance at social mobility, economic security, and the possibility of expedited citizenship for noncitizens (Horton 2017). People who might have been declared enemies of the U.S. or its colonial subjects are now welcome to serve in its military, but often under precarious conditions (Schrader 2019, 117).

Yet, Moskos and Butler argue that military culture promotes a black identity that avoids the pitfalls of victimization. From their perspective, when black soldiers rely on notions of social harm or focus too much on racism, they become stuck in a cycle of blame and victimization that keeps them from taking personal responsibility. Instead, the ideal is a “black identity without the threat—no rage at whites, no talk about compensation for past injustices, no aching sense of victimization” (Moskos and Butler 1996, 118). In the end, it’s about a respectability politics that accommodates a white institution, playing by white rules, and letting go of past claims of injustice while—importantly—participating in military operations against racialized others. Black soldiers succeed when they do not challenge white identity. Most centrally, black soldiers cannot succeed by challenging white identity to the extent that mission readiness involves being ready to invade racial others to impose global regimes of racial hierarchy (Padmore 1990; Mills 2015; Singh 2017)

This is a consequence of the origin of military’s multiculturalism, according to which the scope of diversity is dictated by mission readiness and national interests. The daily lives of service members occur within this institutional framework, and they understand diversity at this level as it relates to the military and nation. Diversity is only valuable to the extent that it supports mission readiness, and by extension, national interests. For this to happen, the military must make commitment to nation and the military fundamental to military identity. But insofar as whiteness is central to the national identity of the United States and its foreign policy, national interests produce a multiculturalism that requires assimilation to whiteness and the erasure of difference. This prohibits a military culture that could foster anti-racism and identities that focus on the past and establish moral or political responsibility, let alone draw connections between domestic and global racial injustice, as the Black Power movement did during the Vietnam War.

Multicultural racism describes the ideological formation at the institutional level. It is expressed through military DEI policies which have been guided by public pressure and cultural shifts but remain limited by the priority of mission readiness. The military knows it must combat divisive prejudices, but only as far as it maintains its own institutional interests. Regardless of its rhetorical intent and attempts at education, military DEI policy is a product of its history and is currently predicated on the assimilation of racial others. Limited as top-down views of an ideology are, multicultural racism does not explain the (re)production of racism in the training process, from the bottom-up. In this sense, integration in the military is a textbook example of misguided integration, one in which formal inclusion gestures at racial justice through intergroup contact, education, and disciplinary measures.

Colorblind Racism in Practice

The colorblind integrationism at play in the military is salient in the process of recruit training, which transforms civilians into militarized subjects. This process can be described in a variety of ways, as I have tried to show. Militarization habituates recruits into a martial technē characterized by its focus on competitive, meritocratic norms, and on high levels of group cohesion for the sake of mission readiness. These characteristics are embodied in the martial habitus. By focusing on the equalizing bodily effects and habitus of military training, this section shows that colorblind meritocracy—a racialized construct—orients relations among recruits and makes them suspicious of claims of racial injustice.

Military training manuals are explicit about this process. According to the Navy’s Basic Military Training Core Competencies Manual, militarization is the first stage of the training process. For the Navy, militarization converts a civilian into “a basically trained Sailor [who] represents the fighting spirit of the Navy and is well-disciplined, loyal, and respectful” (Dept. of the Navy 2019, 11). The “basically trained Sailor” demonstrates military customs and courtesies, and knowledge of military order and discipline (Dept. of the Navy 2019, 9). The Army claims that this is achieved “by learning discipline, standards, values, and teamwork” (Dept. of the Army 2019, 49).

To paraphrase Fields and Fields, ritual repetition of physical activity is fundamental to the martial habitus (2012, 139). Military discipline is a hexis: it is the bodily comportment, habits, and affective dispositions instilled through training. According to the Army, “discipline is developed through individual and group training to create a mental attitude that will result in proper conduct and prompt obedience to lawful military authority” (Dept. of the Army 2019, 145). For example, the traditional practice of “drill” or marching in formation is used to coordinate diverse bodies (Foucault 1995). Drill instills “confidence, pride, alertness, attention to detail, esprit de corps, and discipline” (Dept. of the Army 2019, 102). The military understands that a social practice as simple as walking together has profound effects on individuals and groups (Schrader 2014, 10).

The Army believes that two months of drill is enough to embody habitus. Confidence, pride, and esprit de corps are all, presumably, affective states. They are affects directed to an object that can usually be expressed propositionally: for example, “I’m proud to be a Marine” or “I can overcome this obstacle because I’ve overcome others.” But alertness, attention to detail, and discipline suggest kinds of embodiment. They are states activated in the presence of a stimulus, accompanied by affective and behavioral responses. Alertness, for example, is to be hyper-reactive to changes in the environment. It suggests, though need not require, an affect like anxiety. Behaviorally, it’s expressed by quick attentional responsiveness. The Army rightly suggests these dispositions “affect every aspect of military life” (Dept. of the Army 2019, 151). The militarized subject is likewise characterized by group commitment, cleanliness, and “smartness of appearance of action” (Dept. of the Army 2019, 145). A properly militarized subject feels the importance of the group, of order, and how the group views them.

What connects this habitus to questions of race? Militarization is a process of leveling and shared-identity production; it is colorblind politics as habitus. Moskos and Butler, again, highlight this point: “Social background will never again be as inconsequential in a soldier's Army career as during basic training. The physical rigors of infantry training, the uniform, the mandatory short haircuts, […] all reduce preexisting civilian distinctions” (1996, 73). Militarization is meant to make social differences irrelevant. Marine General Viktor Krulak is blunt about this leveling process:

Initiation starts with a reduction of all to a common denominator. Stripped naked in a group for a physical examination, they are bathed together, their heads clipped, civilian clothing and jewelry removed, all dressed exactly the same. From this moment, none is different from any other. None is better than any other…. [T]hey start from an initial zero and they are rebuilt from there. (1999, 161)

We see here how the military uses an explicit and physical process of reduction that extends down to the level of personal subjectivity. To the extent that it is possible, the military tries to erase social differences. Thus, militarization functions on the assumption that individual and social differences are suppressible (Schrader 2014).

The militarization process functions according to a colorblind racist logic. Following Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, I take colorblind racism to broadly describe “the racial ideology based on the superficial extension of the principles of liberalism to racial matters that results in ‘raceless’ explanations for all sorts of race-related affairs” (2015, 1364). The superficial quality is of primary importance; it is superficial insofar as racial prejudice is merely sublimated into another form of explanation for otherwise race-based issues (e.g., explaining urban poverty as an issue of personal choice).

Meritocratic norms connect homogenization to colorblind ideology. Militarization creates a condition of equality by homogenizing recruits—however unstable and ephemeral that equality may be. From this baseline, the military expects recruits to distinguish themselves through their merits. Rewards, such as promotions and awards, are given to those who outperform their peers. In an important sense, meritocracy functions better in the military than in the civilian world; this is why the military is held up as an example of successful integration by so many thinkers. As scholars have shown, competitiveness and merit are central to military culture (Swain 2016; Abraham, Cheney, and Curran 2015). By using homogenization in preparation for competition, militarization creates an ideal meritocratic space. Successfully militarized subjects embody a meritocratic disposition, seeing the world as a place in which action and achievement are what differentiate people.

Meritocracy is central to colorblind ideology. As Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor observes, colorblindness is invested in the idea that “hard work makes the difference between those who are successful and those who are not” (2016, 72). When conditions are perceived as meritocratic, deviance attributed to individual choice or effort. Indeed, Moskos and Butler find that black service members are twice as likely as the national sample, and more likely than white respondents, to blame poverty on a lack of effort (1996, 45). However, adopting a meritocratic perspective perpetuates systems that make racial dominance appear fair (Dovidio, Gaertner, and Saguy 2015, 1533). Meritocracy and colorblindness animate what Charles Mills calls white ignorance: a form of ignorance about the social world caused by white group interests, but is not limited to white people (2007; see also Cole 2018; Bonilla-Silva, Goar, and Embrick 2006). What makes this especially pernicious is that “through a strategic ‘color-blindness’, [white people] are assimilated as putative equals to the status and situation of nonwhites on terms that negate the need for measures to repair the inequities of the past” (Mills 2017, 63). In this way, the assimilation effects of racial militarism gain purchase even with black service members.

Racism Despite Integration

The multicultural policy of the military and meritocratic conditions of recruit training hardly overcome racism. Instead, I have shown that the assimilationism of multiculturalism and the colorblind politics of recruit training instead result in the ideological formation of racial militarism. I have given accounts of the military’s goals and how recruit training is supposed to go, as well as some theoretical limits to these expectations. In this section, I discuss three recent reports of racism within the military through the lens of racial militarism to explain why the events are less surprising than they should be.

As I discussed earlier, a multicultural military means incorporating recruits who might be associated with the “enemy.” In a 2017 article, a New York Times author reports on the “culture of brutality” in Marine Corps recruit training (Reitman 2017). According to Reitman, Muslim recruits were regularly made to “prove” that they were not terrorists. In one case, a drill instructor ordered a Muslim recruit to mimic decapitating a fellow non-Muslim recruit. Recruits from the division suggested that such activities were common and employed by instructors to promote “unity.” In another incident, a Muslim recruit was hazed so intensely that, while a drill instructor assaulted him, he jumped to his death from a barracks window. When asked about the incidents, a Marine General insisted that there was no cultural problem (Reitman 2017). Though these incidents were illegal under military policy, their occurrence is unsurprising given that the drill instructors are themselves the product of military training and, in particular, often veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Under these conditions, Muslim recruits could only be accepted as Marines by appeasing their military gatekeepers through embarrassing forms punishment and ridicule. Militarization thus required the denigration of Muslim identity and drill instructors were successful only if they could prepare Muslim recruits to kill other Muslims.

These cultural practices occur because militarization requires a disposition for violence. In addition to meritocratic norms and group-cohesion, militarization prepares recruits to undergo and enact violence (Barkawi 2017; Protevi 2009; Schrader 2014). That preparation produces racial difference in ways that are inseparable from gender, class, and sexuality (Basham 2013; Basham 2016; Hale 2012). Indeed, scholars have called hegemonic masculinity the cementing principle of the military’s institutional culture (Abraham, Cheney, and Curran 2015, 5; Hale 2012). This violence does not occur in a vacuum; rather, as I expand on in the next section, racial othering comes with the disciplinary norms performed through violence.

The function of racial militarism is to establish or maintain hierarchies through violence. As a result, “good soldiering” often excuses support for ideologies and behavior of a violent and racist character. For example, an exposé of extremism in the military describes an incident in which a self-proclaimed Neo-Nazi faced disciplinary action when pictures of him at Neo-Nazi rallies were sent to his command: “‘They hauled me before some sort of committee, and showed me the pictures. I just denied it’. The committee, he says, ‘knew what I was about, but they let it go because I'm a great soldier’” (Kennard 2012). This example highlights two effects of racial militarism. First, Army policy only punishes hate speech in cases “when it upsets order and discipline,” but that policy must be enforced by militarized subjects whose habitus prioritizes the mission (Moskos and Butler 1996, 65). Giving voice to the place of group cohesion in racial militarism, Moskos and Butler suggest that soldiers of color simply ignore racist behavior: the best remedy is a common mission, not divisiveness (1996, 45). On the other hand, the compatibility of Neo-Nazism with racial militarism is notable, in the sense that both support social hierarchy and violence. While military hierarchy is formally colorblind, the use of violence by the U.S. military maintains global racial hierarchies around the world. Consequently, under racial militarism, Neo-Nazism and other racist ideologies blur with the notions and practices of “good soldiering.” This affinity explains why many white power militias in the U.S. were organized by veterans and continue to recruit from the military (Belew 2018). Under these conditions, racist soldiers have no incentive to change, and soldiers of color have reason to be skeptical. This skepticism is reflected in the Air Force report; forty percent of black airmen across the ranks did not trust their chain-of-command to take discrimination complaints seriously (DAF IG 2020, 91).

The colorblindness of racial militarism complicates official attempts to improve racial dynamics. DEOMI researchers acknowledge that anxiety about multiculturalism leads “white individuals [to] favor the colorblind approach to diversity,” but “such initiatives may actually have a detrimental effect, particularly for minority members” (Law 2012, 21). The Air Force report likewise points out that ineffective training facilitators likely make diversity issues worse (DAF IG 2020, 133). Voicing a sentiment common in far-right and conspiratorial discourses, a white soldier blogged that he sees a multiculturalist conspiracy in DEOMI’s policies: “I may indeed have stumbled upon and researched something even more important for the country and its race relations and political agendas and practices. This kind of thinking and regulation that I found is a political strategy that can benefit certain people who do not want equality, but rather want the ‘power’ they believe they deserve” (Grisham 2011). For this soldier, multiculturalism is a secret political agenda aimed at gaining power over whites, which conflicts with his ideal of colorblindness insofar as that means avoiding the discussion of race, and he navigates that tension by attributing it to “certain people.” Training meant to improve racial dynamics often makes the situation worse because it makes the status of whiteness salient for those involved, leading them to reactive and defensive behaviors (Jardina 2019). Indeed, these predictable reactions are concerning enough that some racial justice theorists see them as reason to avoid centering race in policy and activist efforts (e.g., Darby 2023).

It is important to recall that racial militarism is a product of U.S. history. For all the multicultural training and presumptions of colorblindness, implicit biases remain strong. An investigation found that black service members are up to 2.6 times more likely than whites to face disciplinary action in the military (Christensen and Tsilker 2017). Disciplinary action is at the discretion of superiors, often commanding officers. It is telling, then, that this occurs despite the prevalence of soldiers of color in leadership positions. Neither the multicultural policy nor the meritocratic colorblind habitus of racial militarism result in proportional disciplinary action. Racial militarism is successful because of its ability to mask its effects and draw support from those most affected by it.

Is Just Integration Possible Within Racial Militarism?

I have focused on integration in the U.S. military because it is upheld by scholars and policymakers as an effective model. But to understand why racial militarism disrupts the potential of integration, more attention must be given to the specific requirements of just integration. In this section, I consider three conditions of integration as racial justice that are at odds with racial militarism.

Even if integration leads to a reduction in negative racial attitudes over time, that does not necessarily lead to a more just society. Stanley argues that when integration “does not effect a serious reappraisal of the white self and the structure of the American Polity, then integration loses its character as a virtuous circle” (Stanley 2017, 129). This is what Shelby identifies as well when he argues that it is not reasonable to expect black people to shoulder the weight of integration efforts, for the “duty of justice does not require such self-sacrifice and heroism” (2014, 282). It is not enough to expel or punish explicitly racist or extremist members, nor to reduce implicit biases; successful integration ought to motivate white people to challenge whiteness and white supremacy. But the burden of challenging whiteness and white supremacy should not be placed on marginalized service members as it often does under the colorblind conditions of martial identity.

Despite the existence of veteran social justice activists, it is not the norm that the military promotes delegitimizing non-normative experiences and knowledge, which is central to Mills' challenge to white ignorance. For this reason, Shelby argues that racially just integration must address the “legitimate counteraims of blacks,” and “give proper weight to the reasonable concerns of blacks themselves” (2014, 273; Stanley 2017, 133). The military does not facilitate these kinds of challenges. As I have argued, racial militarism produces sameness by equally subjecting all recruits to training that orients them to mission readiness. This (re)produces a troubled epistemic structure based on colorblindness and the idealization of whiteness, often in the form of white ignorance. Neither condition facilitates the kind of psychic conversion that would realize the ideal of mutually transformative integration. Through the principle of mission readiness, racial militarism structures the normative and epistemic frameworks that guide policy and practice in the military at the expense of normative reflection, transformation, and the pursuit of racial justice beyond anti-discrimination.

This is because prioritizing black truth-telling, which would be a requirement of justice, or that of any marginalized community, is in tension with the guiding principle of mission readiness. It destabilizes the identity-hierarchy implicit in the ideal of a soldier who integrates by de-prioritizing racial identity. In fact, some military sociologists use an intersectional framework to highlight that the military should avoid the divisive effects of highlighting racial, gender, or sexual identities by promoting a “veteran” master identity (e.g., Rohall, Ender, and Matthews, 2017). As evidenced by recurring appeals to national commitment and diversity to make a more effective force, the DoD clearly embraces this suggestion. With mission readiness as the guiding priority, racial militarism accepts difference only to claim indifference to it in its meritocratic system and to neutralize its effects so that unit cohesion can be achieved. This means that, despite the character ideals of honesty and forthrightness, black truth-telling cannot be emphasized at the risk of threatening the white identity and its structural supports that underpin global U.S. war-making projects. Prioritizing identification with an institution or state that is deeply unjust reinforces the unjust elements of the structure and places unjust burden on nondominant group members. For this reason, Shelby suggests that once the basic structure is improved, commitment to and identification with the nation or institution will likely follow (2014, 285). Radical critics, of course, would ask whether we should legitimize the state in that way.

This points to the worry that policy and theory are too often isolated and disconnected from the larger web of social and material relations. Integration is a process that needs to occur across social realms, but the military is often treated as a self-enclosed sphere, distinct from the civilian world. If integration occurs in the military sphere alone, there is little reason to think the benefits or harms spread through society. Yet, Tarak Barkawi reminds us that the state and military are co-constituting; we cannot treat them in isolation (2017, 4). The economic, social, and political reach of the military as an institution is substantial. Militarism is too embedded in American culture to be challenged through critique. Likewise, too much capital, research, and technology are invested in the profitable “machinery of death” of the military (Gilmore 2022, 185; Singh 2017, 90; Davis 2003, 87). Military and police share the structural role of violence workers who enact the power of the state-market nexus (Seigel 2018, 19). Their violent labor reproduces power by creating social distinctions—through racialization—as “racialization is a key part of US governance” (Gilmore 2022, 265, 192). This function directly connects the culture of racial militarism and its material conditions through the MIC to the prison-industrial-complex and domestic relations of racial domination (Davis 2003, 87). Thus, there is little reason to think that an institution devoted to racist war-making and to unity in the name of mission readiness can promote the deeply transformational kind of integration we ought to pursue for racial justice.

Conclusion

I have drawn on theories of integration and ideology to conceptualize racial militarism as an ideological formation that obstructs the pursuit of racial justice through martial integration. The principle of mission readiness sets the scope of policy rules and DEI narratives to formally acknowledge the value of diversity while subsuming racial difference to martial identity. This is embodied through a martial habitus that requires social homogeneity (the appearance of unity) and hierarchy (readiness to inflict and suffer violence in preparation for conflict). Regardless of the starting point, racial militarism refigures the logics of contact and identity so that even a space of material equality, with diverse leadership and significantly integrated groups, cannot overcome the racializing effects of militarization. Because practices shape the horizon of our understanding and constitute cultural formations, multiculturalism for the sake of mission readiness and meritocratic colorblindness prevent the sort of mutual exchange that “integration as racial justice” requires. As a result, we must grapple with the practical ways in which institutions might encourage white psychic conversions to reappraise their identity and social standing. In the U.S. context, this means that we need to return to the possibility that the military and military service are obstacles—rather than paths—to racial justice.

Is racial justice possible when violence and hierarchy are an institution’s practical organizing principles? Not without substantial structural and material changes that might be viewed as unacceptable from the perspective of mission readiness and national security. From the security perspective, Lyall (2020) argues that formally inclusive societies can produce inclusive militaries, while exclusionary societies create militaries divided by inequality. I have articulated one reason why informal inequalities and discrimination persist despite formal inclusion and efforts to discourage extremism and discrimination. This has two consequences for the possibility of integration as racial justice. On the one hand, militarization habituates complex dispositions that simultaneously reject and enforce racial differences for the sake of enacting state violence. On the other, U.S. economic and political interests depend on racialized enemies and concerns about the transnational movement of racialized others. It is thus not enough to critique extremist ideas or discriminatory behaviors. Instead, the material and structural incentives, conditions, and practices that give life to those ideas must also be challenged. I have drawn on the normative requirements of integration as racial justice to help identify those conditions. Mutually transformative integration requires different organizing principles and the abandonment of central tenets of U.S. security policy and the military-industrial-complex.

Finally, though this paper focused primarily on racial militarism within the U.S. military, the scope and reach of racial militarism is not restricted to the base or the warzone. I have drawn on the insights of black feminist and other radical scholars who have linked racial militarism to the culture and habitus of policing (e.g., Davis 2003; Gilmore 2022; Seigel 2018). So, for instance, as violence workers, police trainees go through academies that structure themselves like military recruit training where they are trained to quickly detect deviance, enforce order, and react swiftly to threats, often from a racialized criminal enemy. Cultural identity is as vital to law enforcement culture as it is to the military; indeed, in-group disciplinary pressure is often identified as a reason “good cops” fail to report the “bad cops.” Moreover, outlandish militarization (in the sense of adopting military techniques, values, equipment, and practices) of law enforcement in recent decades has blurred whatever distinction might have once existed between military and police (Schrader 2019; Seigel 2018; Taylor 2016, 121). In this respect, future research should tease out the commonalities and differences between these institutional contexts and their social effects.