Bishop Garrison on Racism, Recruitment, and Representation in the Military

This podcast episode includes references to the Eurasia Group Foundation, now known as the Institute for Global Affairs.

Show notes:

After the Underground Railroad, Harriet Tubman Led a Brazen Civil War Raid (History Channel, 12/2/19)

Archival audio:

Movement grows to have Confederate names removed from U.S. Army bases (CBS News, 6/10/20)
The Truth About America: Army Bases Around Nation Named After Confederate War Figures (News One Now, 8/22/17)
Stone Ghosts In The South: Confederate Monuments And America's Battle With Itself (NBC News, 6/4/20)
Myths About Confederate Monuments (NowThis, 6/19/20)
Why Are There SO Many Confederate Monuments? (Origin of Everything, 8/20/19)
Investigators: White supremacists exist in military (CNN, 8/8/12)
White Nationalist Recruitment ‘Glorifies Getting Military People Involved’ (MSNBC, 2/21/19)

Transcript:

September 1, 2020

BISHOP GARRISON: It's one thing to say we need to remember our past. I absolutely agree. We need to historically never forget that these individuals took up arms in a violent revolt against the United States government—against the union. And I think the proper place is textbooks and libraries and museums. It is not building statues to glorify their memory.

***

MARK HANNAH: My name is Mark Hannah, and I'm your host for None of the Above, a podcast of the Eurasia Group Foundation. Today, we're joined by Bishop Garrison. He's the director of national security outreach at Human Rights First. Bishop is also the president and co-founder of the Joseph Rainey Center for Public Policy, a U.S. Army combat veteran, and a former defense and homeland security official in the Obama Administration. Bishop, thank you for joining us.

So, you graduated from West Point in 2002. That must mean the attacks of 9/11 happened in the fall of your senior year?

GARRISON: Yes, I was walking out of my national security law seminar class with a friend and roommate, Mike McGuire. We turned the corner, and a professor had it up on CNN. And we watched the, you know—he said, “Hey, a plane hit the tower. That doesn't make sense. Why was it flying solo?” And we sat there and watched the second plane hit. And the professor looked over at us and said, “I guess we're going to war, guys. Get ready.” And nine-and-a-half months later, I was preparing for war as his lieutenant.

HANNAH: And did you go to West Point thinking you would actually be serving in combat? I mean, I know your experience of the 1990s was like my experience of the 1990s. We had some small wars, but there hadn't been a major conflict. So, what were you doing? Were you preparing to get a job on Wall Street, or what were you doing with your West Point diploma?

GARRISON: Sure, I know. I mean, I was applying to serve in some capacity for some amount of time. I was very interested in being in the military. I like the structure provided, the stability, both from a career standpoint, economically, career growth, professionally. My father was a Vietnam draftee. He got a Bronze Star as a young E4, first cavalry. I had two uncles that went into the draft. My grandfather was a World War Two vet.

HANNAH: You came from a military family.

GARRISON: Yeah. Even so, even though they weren't necessarily career folks, they had all served admirably within the United States military and spoke very highly of it. My parents were over the moon that I wanted to go somewhere like West Point. So I was very much focused on having some level of a military career, and then a career in national security is part of my background. Just like anyone else, I was not counting on us going to war. I thought, you know, you have some rotations to NTC, JRTC, and then maybe you go overseas to a career or some type of overseas deployment in support of some operation at some point. I didn't know we would be sitting here now and looking down the barrel of twenty years’ worth of conflict. But when it came down to it, I'm happy to say I felt prepared. I definitely remember being concerned, being scared. I think that's just some natural feelings. But as I progressed through my education and training, once I was in the military, I felt very confident about what we were going into. And it still didn't prepare me for anything I ended up getting engaged in.

HANNAH: Can you talk a little bit about the intersection between race and empathy? What could a more diverse officer corps achieve for the military?

GARRISON: Yeah, and thank you for bringing it up in this way, because I think empathy should be a part of what leads our national security discussion. To be quite honest, it should be a pillar of any national security or foreign policy. And when you talk about it in terms of race, it's an ability or an effort to place yourself in someone else's position and to attempt to understand what it is like to live with their immutable traits. And you're never going to fully understand it. It's much more about sympathy. You're never going to fully grasp or understand what it is that they're experiencing. But it's important for you to know their life experience is different from yours simply because the color of their skin or the way they identify in terms of gender or their sexual orientation or what have you. And here we're talking specifically about race, color of the skin. But I think as we begin to try to teach more of this in terms of the military, our discussions need to be very much focused on what it means to have empathy for those that you're interacting with, whether they be, quite frankly, local civilian population—civilians you're working with day to day—or whether they be the enemy.

HANNAH: I was interested to read some statistics about our armed services generally, and also as it relates to our time in Afghanistan and Iraq. Our enlisted soldiers and service members are very diverse, are they not? And it's the officer ranks, and specifically the top and the highest tiers of the officer ranks, that fail to reflect the diversity of the American population. Is that right?

GARRISON: Yes. I think I went through and looked at the top—what I considered or called the top—eighteen flag officers within the military right now. When you look at how many identified as being diverse at the time, it was two, with no women. And that was before General Charles Brown took over as chief of staff of the Air Force. So it was, I think, Cybercom and maybe AFRICOM, that were diverse. So that's problematic.

HANNAH: But let's talk about why it's problematic, because I think it's problematic on a couple of different levels.

GARRISON: Sure. Well, you're not talking about representation for the sake of just saying you have proper representation. To your point, I actually kind of take it back to the whole discussion of innovation, for instance, or I compare the two. If you have a homogenous group—the same types of people with the same types of experiences dealing with the same issues—more likely than not, the vast majority of the time your outcomes are going to be the same. So, the idea of diversity is not for diversity’s sake. It's to have new, innovative thinking. It’s to have people with different life experiences looking through the different lenses through which their world has been built by those experiences and coming up with different, unique ways to tackle the same problem. There is a larger share of diverse individuals within the enlisted ranks that isn't properly reflected in the officer ranks. And if you're talking about recruitment and retention and the ability to keep those individuals within the armed forces, you're really talking about them having the opportunity to engage with leaders that reflect their life experiences, to have mentors that reflect their life experiences. It’s just like anywhere else in corporate America or what have you. People are much more likely to have a happier work environment when that work environment has diversity of experience and background and diversity of thought.

And they're more likely to stay when they are able to seek help, advice, and mentorship from people who understand what their life experiences have been. If you don't have that diversity properly represented in the top tiers of your leadership chains, it demonstrates that maybe you do not value it throughout the rest of your organization, and you're not going to see the same levels in command positions that you should throughout the entirety of your organization. And that's incredibly, like I said, problematic.

HANNAH: I was really struck by something General Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, recently said before the House Armed Service Committee. It was talking about how Confederate officers, who we honor by naming military bases after them, were in fact committing treason on the United States and violating their oath and all these things. But the thing that struck me was that he was relating a personal story about how a staff sergeant approached him and said how difficult it was to work every day on a military base named for a man who enslaved his grandparents.

Interlude featuring archival audio

HANNAH: And it seems to me that there's just a failure of imagination to appreciate the offense that would cause.

GARRISON: Absolutely. I'm from Lexington, South Carolina.—Go Wildcats— a proud graduate of Lexington High, and my parents were high school sweethearts back in Gaffney, a little town in South Carolina. So, all of my family roots reside in the Deep South.

I grew up looking at people waving the Confederate flag on a regular basis, and I didn’t understand why they didn't understand how that symbol affected me. And then we went to West Point, and you had Lee barracks and statues and calls. And it's one thing to say we need to remember our past. I absolutely agree. We need to historically never forget these individuals took up arms in a violent revolt against the United States government—against the union. I do not disagree with that. I think the proper place is textbooks and libraries and museums in the proper context. It is not building statues to glorify their memory. The vast majority of the use of a lot of these symbols were, by the way, during the Civil Rights movement. It was a way to attempt to have a chilling effect on blacks and people of color who wanted equal opportunity and equal vote and just an equal life within the United States.

So the fact that we're holding onto some of these arguments as though this is a part of our heritage and a part of our culture is, quite frankly, asinine, because it's not. These are traitors—flat out, end of sentence, period—and we need to treat them as such. We need to have that proper context lined into the fabric of the discussions we have about these individuals and about these points.

HANNAH: So you're saying this is less about honoring history than it is about dog whistling racism?

GARRISON: Sure. Well, I mean, it was also about appeasement of Southern states to some degree, too. If we really want to go back and start talking about this, we can get all the way down into the idea of reconstruction era. We're seeing that materialized in policing today and how Jim Crow affected all these things. A large part of why these bases were named, why these statues were erected, and why the Confederate flag began to fly above a lot of state houses in the South inherently deals with the original sin of slavery and racism. Overall, you cannot separate one from the other.

Interlude featuring archival audio

GARRISON: The fact that we continue to have bases named for these individuals and continue to see some of these statues standing in military towns and near these federal lands is appalling and is ridiculous because we know what the background of why those statues exist is. General Lee did not want—he straight up said, “Don't erect statues of us.” Don't have these types of commemorations we have today. It's bad. Don't do it. If nothing else, he at least saw the need for that.

Another fact is a few of the people—actually a lot of them—we have bases named after weren't good strategic thinkers or tacticians either. When you look at Fort Hood, General Hood was incompetent, and that's not a subjective idea. He was objectively incompetent, nd he got men killed. Bragg was the same way. So I don't understand why we have bases named after these people.

HANNAH: Not too long ago, you put out a piece on security that I thought was fascinating because you not only joined the chorus of people who righteously think we should be renaming these bases away from Confederate figures, but you affirmatively put forward some alternatives of people who could be honored with the renaming of these bases. Can you walk us through one or two of those that you think, if you had your druthers, who would these military bases be named for?

GARRISON: I think you have several folks that are part of the Tuskegee Airmen. You have General Davis. You have General Robinson. I think those are two huge names right off the bat that you could look to name bases after. I am a huge, huge proponent of Harriet Tubman’s name, actually. And I should say this in full disclosure—I just had a little daughter. Her name is Harriet Eleanor, named after Harriet Tubman and Eleanor Roosevelt. I think having a base—particularly, if possible, in Maryland—named after Harriet Tubman would be a tremendous way to show the direction in which this country is truly moving.

HANNAH: But a lot of people listening will say, “Well, she didn't serve in the military.” How did Harriet Tubman help the union army?

GARRISON: Though she wasn't in uniform herself, she served as a spy, and she actually led raids that freed slaves, on several accounts. That’s separate from her efforts to go back continuously to Maryland and free her own family members that she brought into the north. She did that dozens and dozens of times, but she was also one of the first women in history to actually lead a combat operation. And people don't realize that.

HANNAH: Wow, I did not know that.

GARRISON: When I say combat, it was a part of a larger raid, an effort. She had a group of freed slaves that she led to help fight and free other slaves at the time in the south. She was one of the first women on record to ever do that type of operation.

HANNAH: Bishop, you mentioned, growing up in the South, how offensive it was for you to see Confederate flags, but it was also part of your daily experience of life there. Can you talk about how you felt or how transformative it was when the Pentagon issued a rule effectively banning Confederate flags from any military bases?

GARRISON: Sure. I think that is a very logical first step in this overall moment or movement in history and in this dialog we're seeing around race issues. For me, there's a certain level of cognitive dissonance that has been associated with the stars and bars, the rebel battle flag, for some time. Growing up, it was really strange because my mother was a teacher in our local school district, and she had tons of kids that absolutely loved her and would come up to me and tell me how much they like having my mom as a teacher. And they would do so with a huge Confederate flag shirt on or a Confederate flag hat. And I just never understood that. And for them, you know, the argument of heritage, not hate—again, for reasons I've previously outlined—particularly when you talk about when that flag resurfaced in American history, they just don't fly.

I'm very happy the military is taking this first major step. The Defense Department sees the issue there. I worry that policy, as it's currently written, also comes at the expense of positive symbols like the LGBTQ flag. I would like to see the policy rewritten to allow that flag on bases. But again, I think the initial first step is there, and we just need to work to refine the overall policy.

HANNAH: It is now time for a round of extraneous miscellaneous questions for which we expect spontaneous answers from Bishop. What is the one book about America and the world you’d require both presidential candidates to read?

GARRISON: There is not one. I can’t answer with that. I'd say, there's a book on the Cold War that I just began reading from John Lewis Gaddis. It’s about the Cold War and how it began from the after-effects of World War Two. I think historically that is a really important era to understand and to know how we got to where we are now when we talk about countries like Russia, for instance, and what our relationship should look like moving forward. I think that that's really important.

HANNAH: The worst American foreign policy blunder of the past one hundred years is…?

GARRISON: The past one hundred years… Man, so many. There are so many. Maybe just in the last, like, four years there have been just an astronomical number. No, I think honestly, it's our inability to hold Russia accountable. I really, really do.

HANNAH: You’re talking about election interference in 2016?

GARRISON: Election interference continuously from the time we—that's one. I would say a very secondary one was our inability to properly filter through the intelligence around 9/11. I think that's another big one. We could sit here and go on all day about this.

HANNAH: I know you served in Iraq. In hindsight, do you think the war in Iraq was a just war, a worthwhile war?

GARRISON: The jury's still out. It's still ongoing. I would say I think we went into the war off of bad, faulty, or partial information intelligence. I would say based off of what we use as the argument to go to war, it was improper. And it was not just, and we should not have entered it.

HANNAH: And that doesn't at all diminish the service of people, like yourself.

GARRISON: Right. Absolutely not. I'm not saying those individuals—you know, jus ad bellum and jus in bello—I'm not saying those individuals didn't serve admirably that we're called upon to serve. I'm saying we placed our military in a precarious and bad position. You don't fight wars against simple ideologies. You need to have stated end goals. You need to have a clear mission objective at the end. And we didn't do that right.

HANNAH: One piece of professional advice you wish you'd received as a kid?

GARRISON: I repeat this to mentees as much as humanly possible: if you're in the room, you're supposed to be in the room, meaning that if you've been given the opportunity, and you feel as though you have imposter syndrome, and you're punching, quote unquote, above your weight—you're not. If you're in that position, if someone has deemed it necessary and appropriate to put you in whatever position you're working in, you're supposed to be there and take advantage of those opportunities, particularly with young people of color and with women. I think we are often battling some of our own insecurities and imposter syndrome day to day. So it's important for us to always remember that.

HANNAH: Final question. A publication you read every day?

GARRISON: There are a few. I'm always going to the papers, to The Washington Post, clicking on Politico Playbook, and going to Defense One for what they have. Nowadays, I'm one of the guys who just hops on Twitter to see, you know, kind of what's going on for better or worse. I recognize that's probably not the best way to aggregate and find your news.

HANNAH: And make sure you’re following some people you disagree with, right? That's what they do.

GARRISON: And I do. I think that is important. But the traditional sources: New York Times, Washington Post, Politico. Politico has a good defense email that comes out regularly as well. And a place I write at, Just Security, is a great place for regular national security information.

HANNAH: I love their stuff.

Now let's take it from that institutional level view to the human level view. There have been all these articles I've read about individual soldiers or groups of soldiers basically banding together, and there are these sleeper cells of white supremacist organizations that exist inside the military and that come in and out—infiltrate, essentially. Is there any validity to that reporting? In your own personal experience of the battlefield, did you see anything like that?

GARRISON: In my personal experience, I did not. Look, when it comes to white supremacy, particularly in the military, I think it's more along the lines of how they're being recruited. At least at the outset, it was about how they're recruited as veterans. They were also looking to bring a lot of these young, impressionable former soldiers or former service members into their ranks as a part of their militias or fighting groups or whatever nomenclature they want to use to call themselves.

That's the first part. What we're seeing now, more so—we've seen direct evidence of it that you allude to—particularly in the past months, is that they have actively been recruiting active duty soldiers and utilizing them for a variety of reasons. The latest one was the young soldiers charged with treason for providing troop movements to a European white supremacist group. When I spoke before Congress, I was asked directly what I thought one of the greatest national threats was to the United States and to the military, and I said white supremacy, because we are not working hard enough to eradicate it within our ranks.

Interlude featuring archival audio

GARRISON: We're seeing more militias, more extremist groups on the rise, and they're going to do everything they can in this movement to tap into these young individuals who are vulnerable right now because it is such a chaotic period in the modern history of our nation. A lot of these individuals are looking for leadership or looking for outlets, and they're susceptible to some of the messaging these groups are using. So, they see the writing on the wall. They know that 2050 is coming when we're going to be a minority majority nation, and they, quote unquote, are worried about their way of life for whatever that means to them.

HANNAH: And that could be wrapped up in all sorts of pathologies or economic insecurities or, you know, there are a number of different explanations for that beyond straightforward racial hatred, right?

GARRISON: Correct, correct. And just like we've seen throughout history, people that are not meeting success for it, for whatever reasons, need to find a scapegoat for that, something tangible they can point to and say, “This is the problem.” And they're utilizing this opportunity to leverage hate in that way and say, “Oh, it's because we have more immigrants here. It’s because we have more people of color in these positions. It’s because we have more women not at home with families but instead in corporate boardrooms.” They're utilizing these types of vulgarities to bring these young individuals into their ranks.

HANNAH: Bishop, thank you very much for taking the time to join us this afternoon.

GARRISON: Yeah, thanks for having me. I’ve got to say, on a final note, we came in talking about West Point. Beat Navy. I did not have an opportunity to say that any time here. That's on me, guys. So, beat Navy in all you do, folks.

HANNAH: Wait, wait, wait. Give that to me with some emphasis, some enthusiasm.

GARRISON: Yeah, absolutely. Beat Navy. Beat Navy, folks.

HANNAH: You can follow Bishop's work at humanrightsfirst.org. He's on Twitter, not just reading, but also posting @BishopGarrison.

I am Mark Hannah, and this has been another episode of None of the Above, a podcast of the Eurasia Group Foundation. I want to give a special thanks to our None of the Above team who make this all possible. Thanks to our producer Caroline Gray, our editor Luke Taylor, our sound engineer Zubin Hensler for making us sound good, and EGF’s summer research assistant who's been wonderful, Keenan Ashbrook, a recent Cornell grad who is on the market for all you employers listening right now.

Bishop, thanks again.

GARRISON: Thank you.]

HANNAH: Be well.

(END.)

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