We have to separate out politics/racial division and racism. Racism is defined as prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against someone of a different race based on the belief that one's own race is superior.
And no matter the color of the victim or the color of the racist, or the politics of either - racism must be stopped. It’s a horrendous crime.
And everyone, left or right, should stand out against it. And everyone, in and out of the military, should be trained and retrained to identify and stop it.
The politics today is ridiculous. Assuming and spreading that one side is racist for political gains hurts what should be the true goal ... ending real racism.
Listen to the training. And make sure you and everyone around you treats all human beings with the same respect you would want. A proud conservative would want nothing less.
Well put. Key point is to develop the crucial habit of making separations - above all, separate
1. your humane and healthy, instinctive empathy for your fellow humans/soldiers/citizens from
2. your cool, analytical assessment of facts and evidence and logic from
3. your political preferences and affiliations.
#1 should always come first. Empathy is absolutely essential for any good leader, and makes you a better comrade or colleague as well.
The hard part is finding a way to preserve #2 - your dedication to using logic and evidence as the basis for effective decision-making - without sacrificing #1, your empathy and solidarity with those whom you would lead.
Re #2, sorry to say this but a lot of today's well-meaning "diversity & inclusion" training is unfortunately based on non-facts, myths, dubious propositions, and junk science. The most notorious of these bad ideas is the pseudoscience concept of "implicit association", which forms the basis for the well-meaning but bogus "implicit association training" (IAT). Heather MacDonald at city-journal.org has repeatedly called BS on IAT and other bogus theories, as have many eminent social scientists of many different ideological persuasions.
(Keep in mind that this phenomenon of garbage science infecting psychological research is by no means unique to this particular social issue; academic psychology as a discipline is currently facing a scandal of enormous proportions due to the profession's notorious use of unfalsifiable experiments, corrupt and deliberate tampering with experimental data, and in many cases, completely bogus theories unsupported by evidence.)
So you have to find a way, IMHO, to
project empathy (#1) for others while
preserving attachment to logic and evidence (#2).
As to #3, your political affiliation?
Hide it if you can, or at least
keep a strict separation between your political affiliation and activity and your workplace/service identity.
That's very unfortunate, I know, and I wish we all could hold forth in the public square without fear of reprisal or retaliation (let alone being clocked from behind by some lunatic wearing a mask), but such is our brave new world.