Okla-homey
7/26/2008, 11:15 AM
On this day in 1947, President Harry Truman, a Democrat from Missouri, signed an Executive Order declaring segregation in the military at an end. Henceforth, everyone was treated the same in the military, regardless of race, ethnicity, or national origin.
The consensus among experts has been it has worked extremely well, and Harry's move 61 years ago today, put the military out in front of the civilian sector by about twenty years.
Today, all Marines and soldiers are green, all sailors and airmen are blue.
The only thing is, black folks make up about 17% of the force in aggregate, yet only constitute about 6% of the officer corps. Try as we might, we haven't been successful in closing that gap. I suspect it has a lot to do with a combination of the circumstances of those folks' communities, poverty and the fact their public schools were crappy.
That said, some military jobs are closed to women, but there has to be a good reason for doing so. As such, the jobs still closed to women are pretty much limited to: field artillery firing batteries, with the exception of multiple launched rocket systems, infantry, and armor (because people in those jobs are likely to close with the enemy and might have to duke it out); and submarines (because personal privacy is virtually impossible.)
The consensus among experts has been it has worked extremely well, and Harry's move 61 years ago today, put the military out in front of the civilian sector by about twenty years.
Today, all Marines and soldiers are green, all sailors and airmen are blue.
The only thing is, black folks make up about 17% of the force in aggregate, yet only constitute about 6% of the officer corps. Try as we might, we haven't been successful in closing that gap. I suspect it has a lot to do with a combination of the circumstances of those folks' communities, poverty and the fact their public schools were crappy.
That said, some military jobs are closed to women, but there has to be a good reason for doing so. As such, the jobs still closed to women are pretty much limited to: field artillery firing batteries, with the exception of multiple launched rocket systems, infantry, and armor (because people in those jobs are likely to close with the enemy and might have to duke it out); and submarines (because personal privacy is virtually impossible.)