How do you know they are "fine cadets?" Because they are graduating? We will never know their true intent, but had the photograph been of white women graduates only, excluding all other graduating females we would have seen protests probably.
Our nation will never be united if we keep segregating ourselves into groups like this. Promoting only one race is bound to irritate the others. There are plenty of rich people of color and plenty of poor white folk, and vice versa.
We need to band together and ignore color and religious differences. If I'm ever in a fox hole under fire, I don't care what color my partner is, I want him or her to have my back, and I'll do the same.
I do find that photo in poor taste. If they were hugging and smiling, celebrating, then hoorah. To raise fists and glare indicates anger, not celebration. They all received a world class education without tuition, and even though they have a service obligation, should feel gratitude and realize that they can be role models for thousands of young kids. Hopefully the message they send will be to work hard, succeed and serve. Not get your education and rise up agains the establishment.
I liked the other version of their photo better, and it will inspire some young black girls, but still feel that grouping according to color is basically wrong.
How do you know they aren't fine cadets? That should always be the assumption unless there's evidence to the contrary. This photo is hardly evidence.
I wish I could say I'm shocked that the old trope has come out..."If this had been whites excluding blacks blah blah blah". If this had been whites excluding blacks the photo could be titled "business as usual in American education for two plus centuries."
This whole concept is one you should probably come off of permanently. "If we keep segregating ourselves." You mean like overwhelmingly disenfranchising minorities with laws to prevent the scourge of non-existent voter fraud? Or police overwhelmingly shooting young black males without cause? Of three quarters of our prison inmates being black? Or maybe telling black women they can't take a photo with their fists raised (regardless of what their actual intent may have been) at a place where we still somehow think it's okay to make black cadets live
LEE BARRACKS.
This is the worst kind of white revisionism. "Hey now all you coloreds...if you
REALLY cared about being treated like equals, you'd stop looking out for one another and just play by our rules...come on now, blacks...if you weren't so racist you'd trust the system that has systematically failed you for 240 years!"
Yes, they have a service obligation. They have an obligation to uphold the values of western democracy...a democracy that has continually told black Americans, female Americans, and
especially black women, that they are always just a little bit "less than." This forum is another great example, with a bunch of old white dads suddenly terribly concerned about military personnel policy because a few vaginas dared to saunter in and say "I'm pretty sure I can do this to, so watch me do it."
This photo is a tempest in a teapot stirred up by white people who are aghast that these 20-something members of a generation that is tired of inheriting a legacy of shame and societal failure dared to raise a fist. If it was a group of white women no one would care what the politics behind it were...we wouldn't even ask...we'd assume they meant "go team" and move on. Instead these women are somehow the next Malcolm X because they raised their fists?
This photo tells us more about the people viewing it than it does about the women in it.
