Why the Pentagon's website reversals are mixed victories

We get it. People with honest hearts need good news right now to cling to like a buoy in a storm. There is SO much to be angry about. People being deported to hellish prison camps without due process. Agencies being unconstitutionally gutted. Unelected billionaires buying their way into government. Unthinkable shifts in foreign alliances. With all that going on, seeing the Pentagon reverse their indefensibly stupid decision to delete records about people from marginalized communities is a sliver of light in the dark eclipse of the Trump administration.

We should definitely celebrate these website restorations. The people and organizations who spoke out against these abominable actions deserve applause for demanding that these records be returned. They refused to let the Pentagon quietly erase anyone who is not white, straight, and male. They reminded that federal governments that veterans, and the people who support them, are a potent political force. They spoke up and won.

Thanks to their efforts, an article about Jackie Robinson's military service has been restored. A page about General Charles C. Rogers, a Black Medal of Honor recipient was put back up. Pages about the Navajo Code Talkers, the Japanese American 442nd Combat Regiment, and the Tuskegee airmen have reappeared, among other reversals.

However, the Pentagon has been in no way apologetic about the fact that these removals happened in the first place. As Timothy Geigner on Techdirt states, "These records, often matters of valuable historical content, get removed and the administration waits to see who screams about it so they can clean up any messes they made."

Rather than accepting responsibility, their spokesperson Sean Parnell is blaming their AI tools for the racism and bigotry without offering a satisfactory explanation for why they chose to program these tools to erase marginalized Americans from their records in the first place. We all know the answer to that though. Because blaming software for your bigotry and racism is like blaming your car for driving it into a parade float after you got blitzed on tequila and White Claw. Only crashing into a parade float seems less dumb.

The Pentagon also has strategic reasons for restoring these pages. As NPR discussed in a recent story about the webpage removals, people from marginalized communities are key recruiting targets. It is in the military's best interest to have materials that appeal to them. The fact that people and veterans from marginalized communities are seeing people like them fired and erased from military records, is NOT going to help the military's declining recruitment numbers and officials at the Pentagons know it.

An unnamed defense official in an article by CNN said the automated process has led to a lot of collateral damage and that, "Because of these series of events, the department recognizes that this needs to be a more deliberative process involving human beings to ensure that a thorough review of content is completed."

Huh, perhaps the greatest military strategists in the world should have thought of that before they started deleting records like a herd of overexcited toddlers pouncing on bubble wrap. Guess, they were too busy accidentally leaking war plans to reporters.

The point ultimately is that people who value history and diversity should take the win. But we should by no means be satisfied with it. There are countless federal records featuring women, LGBTQ+ people, and other marginalized Americans that were damaged or destroyed by this administration that have not been restored yet. The fascist erasure of marginalized Americans continues and we absolutely need to keep yelling at them about it.

Because, as we all know, erasing people from history is only the start.