The two enlisted Team 4 members are being punished for developing racist memes targeting a Black sailor in their platoon and circulating them in a group chat with other team members, according to the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to provide details of an ongoing investigation. The memes depicted the sailor as a slave, according to visuals viewed by The Associated Press.
According to the official, the sailor who was targeted reported the incidents this year, but they took place beginning in 2022 and the memes circulated for years. The sailor had been in one of the SEAL Team 4 platoons but had his qualifications and SEAL trident revoked last year. He alleged that his failure to remain a SEAL was due to the racist treatment.
Interesting to see that nothing has changed in the last twenty years.
The military is a cesspool of bigotry.
It’s just a cross-section of society at large.
I found the army to be less racist than society at large. It’s much harder to hate someone when your life literally depends on them and you spend all the time with them.
You have to be below a subaverage intelligence level to join, not dissimilar to law enforcement, CBP or ICE so this is not at all surprising.
Some people have no way out of poverty besides military service. Don’t diss every service member for being stupid for joining.
That itself is an indictment on the US.
Also, that is less than half of those in military service. Many of them, regardless of their income level, get radicalized towards white nationalism due to the culture of the institution.
Don’t get me wrong there are good people that have served and I don’t doubt that the US government has taken advantage of their desperation.
But normalization of a culture that portrays a black colleague as a slave or downplays sexual assualt is unacceptable in my view (regardless of tax bracket).
These sorts of things happen in every work environment I have been in. There’s always going to be some bigots in the work place regardless because they exist everywhere. Of course there are professions like the military where these attitudes are more common and that is unfortunate. My opinion is if you see it take place in any profession, call them out on it.
They then go to other countries and kill civilians, for money. Fuckem.
That’s more a wisdom issue and it is not even close to the same thing as intelligence. Also, many people have specialties outside of infantry and never come close to combat or even leave their home base.
You’re spot on about wisdom, but it’s not like people in non combat jobs aren’t there to support the mission of killing people the government wants killed. Just because they aren’t holding the gun, it doesn’t mean they aren’t sharing responsibility for the bullet
You can’t tell someone to point a gun at someone they’ve never met and blow their head off without first training them to be a violent bigot. The bigotry is the core business.
To be fair, they are people who go out to kill on orders. To expect them to be emotionally sensitive to our lives might be expecting too much. They’re kinda like smarter pitbulls you set loose on your enemy.