“If you can’t treat someone from another race or a different color skin with dignity and respect then you need to get out,” said Lt Gen Jay Silveria, before encouraging the assembled academy of more than 4,000 cadets and staff to take out their phones and record him saying it again.
“You keep these words, and you use them, and you remember them, and you share them, and you talk about them,” Silveria said.
He was responding to a report in the Air Force Times that five black cadet candidates at the preparatory academy had had the words “go home nigger” written on the whiteboards outside their dorm rooms.
“If you’re outraged by those words then you’re in the right place. That kind of behavior has no place in the United States air force,” Silveria said. “You should be outraged not only as an airman but as a human being.”
The preparatory school, which is on the air force academy campus in Colorado Springs, enlists about 240 students – typically in their late teens – each year to train and study to attempt to be accepted as freshman cadets the following year.
“These young people are supposed to bond and protect each other and the country. Who would my son have to watch out for? The enemy or the enemy?” questioned one of the cadet candidate’s mothers who posted about the incident on Facebook. That post was later taken down.
Silveria said that some of the recent high-profile racist incidents in the US had influenced his decision to speak out.
“We would be naive to think that we shouldn’t discuss this topic. We would also be tone deaf not to think about the backdrop of what’s going on in our country. Things like Charlottesville and Ferguson, the protests in the NFL,” he said.
Officials said the academy’s security forces were investigating the incident, but that no additional information was released.
