For the past four years, Hadley Deforty, a high school world history teacher, has taught students the navy’s story of Healdolis Miller.
Miller, a ship chef, attacked a Japanese plane at Pearl Harbor in 1941 and fired it with a gun, then led other sailors to safety. This effort made him the first black sailor to receive a naval cross, and his image was used in recruitment posters.
But earlier this year, when Diforti went to the Navy website that he had used for years to teach students about Miller’s story, it was defeated and the students felt “pretty upset.”
“I was very angry,” said the Tennessee teacher. “I’ve been teaching him for four years in a row and the kids really like to learn about him,” she said, and she relied on the .gov website because she can trust them, but “Not now.”
The Department of Defense did not respond to requests for comment on the story. John Uriot of the Pentagon Press told NBC News earlier this week. “Day died at the Department of Defense. Discriminatory fairness ideology is a kind of awakened cultural Marxism that has no place in our military. It divides troops, erodes unit unit unit unit unit unit unit unit and disrupts “core war mission.”
One of the Navy webpages about the mirror was restored, but others aren’t. He is one of many with marginalized backgrounds documented in thousands of web pages and images where military history has been scrubbed from the Pentagon website, calling for President Donald Trump’s executive order to leave government agencies with access to what could be perceived as diversity, equality and inclusion.
“We are pleased with the prompt compliance across the department with the directive to remove DEI content from all platforms,” continued Ullyot. “In rare cases where content has been deleted, intentionally or incorrectly – it deviates from the clearly outlined scope of the instructions, so directs the component and modify the content accordingly.”
Several pages on numbers like Jackie Robinson, Tuskegee Aviator, Navajo Code Talker, and General Colin Powell in the Desert Storm Age have recovered after public wrath. But many remained and have not been restored.
“It’s confusing and discouraging to witness the very narrative-obscuring initiative that poses as Day and shapes our collective history,” says Nika White, a longtime DEI expert and book author. “To rule out references to these numbers not only undermine Dei’s basic principles, it stands as an obvious contradiction with the pursuit of truth.”
Given the myriad contributions of black people, people of color, military heroes and historical figures by members of the LGBTQ community, the amount of truth that is to be lost is substantial.
“The day at the heart of this is recognizing and evaluating the diverse experiences and contributions of all individuals, especially those who have been historically marginalized,” White said. “To erase these contributions is to engage in a form of historical revisionism that reduces the legacy of countless service members who fought bravely for our nation.”
Multiple pages about Robinson, the second middle-in-law in the Army, continued to break through the colour barriers in professional baseball, but were defeated, including pages about Negro League players talking about service in the military. However, as of Wednesday afternoon, at least one page on Robinson had revived in a series about military athletes.
Similarly, most of the web pages about Miller are down. One command page of Navy history and heritage regarding the mirror has been restored, but a large red banner at the top of the site warns that the content has been “modified or removed to suit the president’s executive order and DOD priorities.” Other web pages about him on the Navy website remain.
“It’s not fair and it’s really shocking that the government does this,” Diforti said. “I want my students to see heroes serving this country and realize that they are not just heroes who look like them and look like me, but that they may one day become like them.”
Henry Lewis Taylor, director of urban studies at the University of Buffalo, said that omissions of Black War heroes like Miller “reflect the broader efforts to erase black history and the broader efforts to return to an era in which American history is an illusion focused on white glory.
He said it appears to be a priority to white participation and the history of heroism. “This erasure isn’t just an attack on black people and other people of color. It’s an attack on the truth itself, turning history as a social science into a fairy tale.”
Donald Williamson, who served 25 years in the Army, said the change was “a sad day in America.”
“This goes against everything we’ve been taught about diversity and inclusion in the rank,” he said.
The Army website has been removed and this week the page for the 442nd Regiment Combat Team has been revived. More than a third of the soldiers were born to Japanese immigrants and despite addressing American racism, the 442s became the most decorated unit in American military history on its size. The group, which had to be restocked several times, served a total of around 14,000 soldiers, of which 9,486 received Purple Heart, 21 Honorary Medals and 8 Presidential Forces quotations.
The pages that went missing on the Arlington National Cemetery website last week were about World War II bomber pilot Hector Santa Anna and famous black, Latino and female veterans. Among the missing information was a former general who became Powell’s first black president of the co-status chief, the highest rank in the military after the president. His page was restored on March 16th.
Medgar Evers, a civil rights iver who served in the Army during World War II, has also been removed from the Arlington Cemetery website. In 2017, Trump called Evers “the great American hero” at the opening of the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum.
Historian Taylor mentioned the book “Black Reconstruction in America” by Scholar Web Dubois. In it, DuBois argued that white scholars deliberately forged American history to create stories that provided a “false but comforting sense of accomplishment,” Taylor said.
In the book, Dubois said that such manipulation led people to describe history as “lied”, warning that this misinformation has destructive consequences. Taylor said DuBois had foreseen what was going on now.
“There’s nothing good about this,” Taylor said.
