“Gated” Community, Nostalgia and Diversity — by author and IP attorney Timothy Trainer
March 19, 2025 — We’re counting in weeks the length of time this administration has been in power.
To many people, it might feel like it has been much longer. It’s hard to pick just one, two or three things that might have raised blood pressure readings recently. Among the many issues being raised, there is the recent report that “Materials on the Arlington National Cemetery website highlighting the graves of Black and female service members have vanished as the Trump administration purges government websites of references to diversity and inclusion,” Arlington Cemetery Website Loses Pages on Black Soldiers, Women in Military and Civil War – The New York Times.
Being of an age north of 70, I have to remind myself what “woke” means or what the acronym “DEI” stands for despite the fact that they appear in the media often.
According to Merriam-Webster, woke is being “aware of and actively attentive to important facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice)”. On its face, it’s hard to read this and conclude that it provokes such negative reactions. Turning to this acronym DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion), it, too, is reason to pause and wonder why it has become so controversial in a country where so many ethnicities and cultures intersect. It’s hard to read these three words and understand why they cause such angst.
Taken together, they take me back to a different time. I often lived in “gated” or “fenced” communities during the troublesome 1960s and early 1970s. My environment was color-blind in major ways, but it wasn’t color-blind at all. There was a predominant color, and it permeated daily life without notice. Olive drab green (OD green) or some version of it was everywhere. One color mattered most during those years of my youth. It was the color of the work uniform worn by my father and every other dad in our gated/fenced community (this was before the number of women in the military increased to today’s numbers). It was the color of the equipment (tanks, jeeps, trucks, etc.) rolling by on the streets of our “home” town.
No period underscored this color-blind period more than those few years living in Kentucky.
It was just before and just as Vietnam became an American war. My “neighborhood” was called Dietz Acres, a housing area of army families located on U.S. government property–Ft. Knox. Our fathers (white, black, Latino, Asian, etc.) were active-duty career soldiers, and our mothers were a mix of Asian, European, Latino, and, obviously, Americans (white and black).
The families and, more importantly, the children who lived and played there covered the spectrum of skin color, but the only one that mattered was OD green. We played together, we argued, we went to school together, and we did all the things kids do with little or no regard for skin color. At that point in time, it would’ve been difficult to find such a level of diversity anywhere except on a military installation. My neighborhood had kids who were African-American, Korean-American, Japanese-American, German-American, Filipino-American, and, well, half this and half that.
There were two underlying things about us, the children. We saw ourselves simply as Americans. We didn’t know about the hyphenated part that described us. It’s likely that many of us weren’t aware of the hyphenated part of our identities until much later in life.
Because of what our fathers did (and more mothers today), we heard and learned a little about duty to the country and some things bigger than us as individuals. Our wants and desires weren’t exactly at the top of the list. The Army moved us around, whether it was during summer vacation or the middle of the school year. We moved when the Army decided our fathers needed to be transferred to a new posting somewhere else in the United States or abroad.
Looking back, there was nothing that referred to this environment as one that promoted “diversity.”
We just happened to have diversity imposed by the Army. There was no discussion about integrated schooling. It was a natural development because of the make-up of the Army community.
As U.S. society continues to confront the real challenge of race relations and treatment of people of different backgrounds and ethnicities, I sometimes think that I may have lived on an island or someplace surrounded by a moat where those of us in the OD green world were walled off from the rest of the U.S.
It is frustrating, saddening, and anger-provoking to see what is still plaguing U.S. society when it comes to race and ethnicity. The mere fact that neo-Nazis use racial slurs and harass a community of predominantly Black citizens in 2025 reflects a failing of our society: A majority-Black town starts armed protection group after neo-Nazi rally
This multi-cultural population has a lot to offer to each other when it comes to learning about ourselves. Despite the passage of time and the package of laws, what is evidenced far too often is that we have not made as much progress during the past sixty years as we would like to convince ourselves that we have.
It appears that in the halls of power within the U.S. Government, those in power seem to fear allowing Americans to be aware of and learn about the successes and accomplishments of women and people of color.
While these supposed “leaders” are arguing for a colorblind environment, they seem to expose their own fragility and weakness by removing deserved recognition of the successes of women and people of color.
