We All Bleed The Same Color: Law On Anvil To Hold Pentagon Accountable For Racially Offensive Terms In Forms

The United States officially put an end to racism in the 1960s but undesirable vestiges of the bygone era linger on in military records. For soldiers, the people who fight beside them are brothers and sisters, but in official documents, they are still classified according to their races and described in pejorative terms.

A bill awaiting the President's signature would require the defense department to report to Congress its efforts to rid the official military of racially or ethnically insensitive terms, RollCall reported. After all, we all bleed the same color.

Imagine the horror of the parents of a fallen hero when they receive the death certificate and find their child officially described as negroid. That is precisely what happened to a Florida mother whose son Jahmar Resilard, a fighter pilot, was killed in a training accident in 2014.

The outrage led to the editing out of the racial description from military forms but terms such as yellow (for ethnic Asians) and red (for American Indians) are still in use. Department of Defense officials expressed extreme reluctance to begin reviewing all the forms because of the sheer volume involved. That sounds like a sad excuse.

The Florida mother's plight eventually led to the drafting of the National Defense Authorization Act. When the pilot's mother received the offensive document, she reached out to the representatives for her district, who filed a provision that would require the Pentagon to brief lawmakers within six months of the military's efforts to find and fix offensive language.

The bill also requires military leaders to give Congress an effective plan on how to find or fix any other forms that are yet to be called out. The men and women in uniform deserve to be treated equally as human beings.