As the police killing of George Floyd has triggered widespread demands for racial justice, federal Veterans Affairs officials have steered their well-funded agency in the opposite direction. The management culture at the VA has long been steeped in a shockingly overt mindset of white supremacy. The agency’s Trump-appointed head, Robert Wilkie, was a longtime member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans; in 1993, as an aide to racist North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms, he berated Carol Moseley Braun, then the Senate’s only Black member, for seeking to block the federal renewal of the battle-flag logo for the United Daughters of the Confederacy. Another senior manager at the agency, David Thomas, displayed a portrait of Nathan Bedford Forrest, the first grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, in his office, until Black employees petitioned him to remove it in 2018.
And as New Republic contributor Jasper Craven notes, this toxic management culture continues in the summer of Black Lives Matter protests. The VA center in Kansas City, Missouri, marked the recent Juneteenth holiday commemorating the day when news of the Emancipation Proclamation reached slaves in Texas with an email from a senior manager informing Black employees that they should prepare to exhibit themselves as installations in a “living museum” of historic Black figures, such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Harriet Tubman. One employee was even told to impersonate the recently martyred Floyd himself—until that suggestion gave way to Emmett Till, evidently because it’s somehow less offensive to play the part of a victim of an organized lynching who was murdered at a more remote point in time. Amazingly, the email leaked to the press just three days after Black employees had staged a protest at the facility, citing long-standing racist treatment there: In the previous three months, Craven writes, Black VA workers and community groups such as the NAACP had documented abuses at the Kansas City hospital including Black workers being called the N-word, “monkey” and “Aunt Jemima.”
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What makes the VA’s ugly track record on race especially noteworthy, Craven observes, is that the agency was founded with an explicit mission to extend equitable, universal benefits to Black veterans. While it wasn’t officially chartered until 1930, the VA bore the legacy of President Abraham Lincoln’s pledge to provide care and income support to more than 180,000 Black veterans who had served on the Union side in the Civil War. While the VA has historically hired Black employees at a higher rate than other federal agencies, structural racism is embedded in many of its daily operations, Craven writes:
Black employees and veterans often confront deeply ingrained and discriminatory institutional practices at the VA. Even as the department runs a Minority Veterans Center and a seemingly effective “African American employment program,” it also sinks millions a year into upkeep and guardianship of Confederate graves. Critics say the Trump administration has exacerbated an atmosphere of racial inequality, not least by establishing an “Accountability and Whistleblower Protection Office” in the VA that’s disproportionately targeted veterans of color in lower-echelon positions, like housekeepers. And while people of color today represent 23 percent of the veteran population—a slice that’s set to increase by 13 points over the next 20 years—VA leadership has been endlessly white.
The VA’s failure to live up to its founding ideals serves as a stark reminder of how much work still needs to be done to bring our lead institutions in line with even a rough semblance of racial accountability. In this case, a good starting point would be the creation of a VA management culture that acknowledges that Black military service, and Black workers who help to administer veterans’ benefits, matter.
—Chris Lehmann, editor |
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