Op-Ed: The Racist Double Standard Benefiting Pete Hegseth – When West Point graduate, Silver Star recipient and retired four-star general Lloyd Austin appeared before a House of Representatives committee in 2024 to testify, Republicans could not have been more insulting.
The then-Secretary of Defense – the first Black person to hold that position, as well as first Black person to serve in several of his other commands, including combat commands over a long and illustrious military career – was under withering and sneering fire for failing to disclose his unexplained work absence of a few days following complications from prostate cancer surgery.
It was an embarrassing gaffe which Austin owned and for which he apologized – and offered his resignation, which rightfully was refused.
Back then, Republicans demanded it, calling him an “embarrassment” and saying his mistake rendered him unfit.
“You’ve held yourself to a different standard,” then Republican Rep. Michael Waltz wailed.
Different standards? My, how standards have changed for Pete Hegseth, a man who has failed up to do more to attack and undermine Black excellence in our military than any Dixiecrat senator from the 1950s could EVER have dreamed.
Hegseth is a former Fox News host and multiple-loss GOP political candidate accused of sexual assault, serial drunkenness, and corruption and incompetence while running two right-wing nonprofits into the ground.
In the past week, the Pentagon inspector general issued a damning report that showed how Hegseth’s bumbling use of Signal to send classified war plans to a group that included a reporter actually put American troops at risk. – a charge that Hegseth lied about in response.
This is after reports that Hegseth ordered the killing of two shipwrecked drug runners clinging to a boat in the Caribbean – part of a larger campaign not authorized by Congress that is using an entire U.S. Navy carrier group to blow speed boats out of the water while threatening war with Venezuela.
The same Republicans like Senators Tom Cotton and Roger Wicker who attacked Lloyd Austin – whose four decades unblemished record of service wasn’t enough to save him from their calls for resignation – are now circling the wagons around Hegseth, whose scandals multiply daily.
Beneath it all lies something really ugly and that is the Hegseth Pentagon’s open hostility to Black achievement.
Hegseth is purging the military of Black admirals and generals, including the removal of Gen. C.Q. Brown Jr., the decorated Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, whom Hegseth accused of the crime of “wokeness” and promoting diversity and inclusion in the military.
Hegseth’s entire campaign against “D.E.I,” the shorthand used as a slur to insult every nonwhite officer out there, included some efforts to actually erase the proud history of the American military as a democratizing, merit-based place for Black and Latino Americans to participate fully in our country.
The Trump/Hegseth whitewashing of the Pentagon got so out-of-hand at the outset that they removed a Jackie Robinson web page.
At the same time he is attacking Black flag officers, Hegseth has valorized white supremacy by restoring Confederate general staff names to American military installations. Including incompetent Confederate generals like Braxton Bragg.
There is no room for Jackie Robinson in Hegseth’s military, whose memory must be removed – but plenty of room for slaveholding and incompetent Rebel generals who fought to keep Black people enslaved like Bragg.
One thing that they couldn’t remove? Hegseth’s white supremacist tattoos.
Secretary Austin did more than his measure for his nation. Quietly. Humbly. He was a thoughtful warrior and American patriot who comported himself with grace and dignity under fire – you’d never see him screaming on a cable show.
Meanwhile, with mistake after mistake, with a never-ending loss of American honor under his dereliction, Secretary Hegseth now benefits from a racist double standard.
Illinois Sen. Willie Preston (D-16) is a candidate for the Second Congressional District and Chair of the Illinois Senate Black Legislative Caucus.
Op-Ed: The Racist Double Standard Benefiting Pete Hegseth
