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For the past few months, the Atlantic’s Clint Smith has been trying to understand what it’s like for Black service members to report to a secretary of defense like Pete Hegseth.
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Hegseth has called “Our diversity is our strength” the “single dumbest phrase in military history.” He has declared Black History Month “dead.” And within days of taking charge at the Department of Defense in January 2025, he fired the military’s highest-ranking Black officer, Gen. Charles Q. Brown.
A little more than a year later, more Black officers have been let go—or simply walked off the job. Then there are the promotions Hegseth has personally blocked, many of them of minorities and women.
The military was one of the first integrated environments in the U.S., and Smith worries about its future. “Decimating the officer infrastructure, these folks who have been in the military for a long time, who often serve as mentors to many of the younger service members, it’s going to have a profound impact on the long-term landscape of what the military looks like,” he said.
On a recent episode of What Next, host Mary Harris spoke to Smith about how Hegseth is making the U.S. military a worse career option in symbolic and material ways. This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Mary Harris: It seems like so many of the people you’ve spoken to are struggling with this question: “Do I stay or do I go?” And everyone had a different answer. A lot had contradictory answers, saying: “If we leave, there won’t be anyone left. Nevertheless, I’m leaving.” And you pressed on that with people. What was that conversation like?
Clint Smith: People have been struggling with this in a profound way. It’s a sort of existential crisis people are having. They recognize that if every single Black person leaves the military, there will be nobody left. We are already in a moment when they conceive of military leadership attempting to reconstitute Jim Crow within the military, and if the number of people in the military drops in such a precipitous way, it is going to be incredibly difficult, even under the best of circumstances, to build that back. So there’s a recognition of that fact. But at the same time, there is this feeling of: How much can you subject yourself to without it pushing you over the edge? How much can you allow yourself to be complicit in?
I spoke to a lot of these folks in the midst of what was happening in Minnesota, when it was unclear if the president was going to deploy troops to U.S. cities to fight against protesters and activists in the streets. These are folks who are like, “I come from a civil rights tradition.”
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How are they thinking through what they would have done in that circumstance?
Some said, “If I’m deployed to a U.S. city to quash a protest, I will leave. I will not do it.” Others said, “If I am deployed to a U.S. city, I’ll try to do it in a way that is respectful of people rather than trying to bash skulls.” So I think there’s a mental gymnastics that people are trying to navigate. And sometimes the answer depended on the day, because the news was changing so much, whether it was Minnesota or Iran.
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People recognize that the U.S. military has not always been an institution, through its intervention, through its imperialism, that is consistent with the personal values that they may hold. But I think this administration is an outlier, in some ways, in terms of how brazen it is in its actions, threats, and rhetoric. People are really wrestling with whether they can be a part of that.
The small acts of resistance that you quantified stuck out to me. You talked about one person, a political appointee—this was before Donald Trump came into office—who knew they were going to be out of a job after Trump came in. The transition team comes to them ahead of time and says, “Could you quantify all the DEI programs so we can know what those are?” And they were like, “Actually, I can’t. You can do that when you come in.” And it struck me that we have so little visibility into those small acts of resistance that might be happening now. We don’t know who’s saying no, who’s saying yes. All we see is when a boat is bombed or when someone’s promotion is stopped.
And I do think that there are a lot of people who just believe they have to wait it out. Their sense of responsibility is that they take an oath, not to a president, not to a secretary of defense, but to the Constitution. And what they’ve told me is that when they’re out there serving the country, when they’re fighting abroad, when they’ve been deployed, they’re fighting for the Constitution, which is to say they are fighting for the promise of America.
Martin Luther King Jr. famously talked about the Constitution as a promissory note that reflected the aspirations of this nation, not necessarily who this nation was at a given moment. The echo of that is something that I heard over and over again, this sense that “I’m not fighting for what this country is. I’m fighting for what this country can be. And if I leave, who’s going to be left to do that?”
You used to teach high school. How would you advise a young Black person who came to you now and said they wanted to join the military?
I’ve been thinking a lot about my days as a high school teacher. The U.S. Army would set up a table inside the cafeteria of our high school where they would recruit these kids—not even young men and women—into the service. The promise of the military was that it would pay for college, that it would give you financial stability: You’d have a nice home, drive a good car, see the world.
I don’t want to tell any young person that they should not serve this country, especially in the context of the Black American military tradition: this idea of serving what the country can be, almost more so than serving what it is. There’s something incredibly hopeful and inspiring in that. But I do think that people have to think critically and carefully about what it means for them to enter at this moment and to be clear about their own personal red lines as they move into this institution and these organizations.
I had a sign on my wall when I was a high school teacher that said, “Read critically, write consciously, speak clearly, tell your truth.” I think I would point to that and say that as you decide whether to embark on this journey, this is what you have to do, and if you feel that any of those values will be compromised or called into question, then you should question whether that is the place for you to go.
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