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The assertion by Virginia’s chief diversity officer, Martin D. Brown, to Virginia Military Institute cadets that “DEI is dead” was not only wrong; it disregards America’s military history [“Va. diversity chief talks down ‘equity’ in VMI visit,” front page, April 28].
The best response I can offer is a passage written by American editor, author and historian Geoffrey C. Ward shortly after the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and published in Smithsonian Magazine: “From the first, our adversaries have mistaken that central strength [our nation’s diversity] as weakness. ‘You can have no conception of what kind of men composed their officers,’ wrote a Briton of some prisoners he’d captured not long after New York’s fall [in 1776]. ‘[One] was a blacksmith, another a hatter … there was a butcher … a tanner, a shoemaker … yet they all pretended to be gentlemen.’ Some in the Confederacy believed the Union cause was doomed because the Yankee Army included African-Americans and immigrants from everywhere. ‘[It] is filled up with the scum of creation,’ wrote one of Braxton Bragg’s privates, ‘and ours with the best blood of the grand old Southland.’ Adolf Hitler had his own version of that view: Americans would never be able to defeat the Thousand-Year Reich, he assured his aides, because they were a mongrel people. We are a mongrel people, and at our best, we glory in it.”
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