Department of Defense schools move to make military kids into test subjects for Trump-approved education
From bans on Black History Month and Pride clubs to the removal of photos of feminist icons, DODDS schools abroad are enacting racist and homophobic restrictions on student freedoms
As a former student of Department of Defense Dependents Schools (DODDS), I couldn’t be prouder about the frosty reception that expat tweens gave the Secretary of Defense when he visited Europe last month. As the Washington Post reported, “Dozens of American students at [Patch Middle School in Stuttgart, Germany] walked out [. . .] as part of protests aimed at an official visit by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, underscoring the scope of disillusionment with the Trump administration’s crackdown on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives.” Inspired in part by this action, students at another school in the DODDS system, this time in Yokosuka, Japan, staged their own walk-out in late February to protest the anti-DEI measures. And the Yokosuka event was followed last week by a walk-out by students at Kadena High School in Okinawa, in which some 60 to 80 students took part.
So why are these students abroad so upset? To answer that question, some backstory is required. As part of the Trump administration’s war on diversity, equity, and inclusion, Secretary Hegseth has ordered an end to all manner of organizations, commemorations, and recognitions of any group within the armed forces that happens not to be white, male, or Christian. This followed a presidential executive order on military DEI programs, which states that they “undermine leadership, merit, and unit cohesion, thereby eroding lethality and force readiness,” and that diversity initiatives “violate Americans’ consciences by engaging in invidious race and sex discrimination”; meanwhile, a separate executive order holds that DEI involves “illegal and immoral discrimination programs.” And Secretary Hegseth has remarked that, “I think the single, dumbest phrase in military history is, ‘Our diversity is our strength. I think our strength is our unity.”
At West Point, this had led to the banning of organizations like the Latin Cultural Club, the Native American Heritage Forum, the National Society of Black Engineers, The Society for Hispanic Professional Engineers, and the Society of Women Engineers. But such restrictions are just the tip of the iceberg in terms of the impact of the anti-DEI edicts among the military, as other initiatives have targeted efforts to ensure greater fairness and opportunity for service members making careers in a U.S. military with a long history of racial and sexist discrimination. (For instance, Black soldiers “make up 9 percent of active-duty officers but only 6.5 percent of generals. They are especially underrepresented at the highest levels — three- and four-star generals — which also have the most influence.”) Perhaps most dramatically, trans service members are currently being drummed out of the armed services. The Trump administration has also made a point of firing high-ranking minority and female officers, to send a message that only preferential treatment (i.e., DEI policies) put them in their positions of power.
But flying under the radar of these consequential moves against diversity and mutual respect in the armed services, the anti-DEI orders have also been promulgated through the educational system responsible for providing schooling for the children of military members serving abroad. The Department of Defense Education Activity (DODEA) has sent instructions to the roughly 160 schools within the DODDS network to apply the new restrictions there as well — and even as DODDEA says it is “conducting an operational compliance review to ensure alignment with” the recent executive orders, school leadership has already implemented sweeping interpretations of the anti-DEI policies.
The restrictions encompass library books, lesson plans, cultural observances, and student clubs. Material banned for now includes: a chapter in an advanced placement psychology course about gender and sexuality; a nonfiction book “about a family coming to accept their transgender daughter”; and “a bundle of instructional materials created for sixth-graders for Black History Month and a biography about Albert Cashier, a transgender man who served in the Union Army during the Civil War.” Beyond this, cultural celebrations such as Black History Month are no longer allowed in DODDS schools, with “a portrait painted on glass of Michelle Obama” being removed as part of this purge, while “[i]n Belgium, American schools at NATO headquarters removed Harriet Tubman posters, origami cranes and art displays that included rainbows ahead of an expected visit by the defense secretary’s wife.” There was also a mass removal of rainbows from kindergarten classes, though it was partially reversed so long as they were not intended as Pride symbols. At a DODEA school in Ft. Campbell, Kentucky, books about slavery and the civil rights movement were removed from library shelves. And at another school, photos of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Susan B. Anthony were taken down.
Perhaps most chillingly, the restrictions have reached directly into DODDS students’ right to associate freely around topics of common interest, with organizations like the Pride club and Women in STEM being disbanded at schools.
As a thought experiment, let’s imagine that we didn’t know anything about the specific policy that had led to implementing the various restrictions in DODDS schools, and had to infer it by the measures taken. Looking at the bans on African-American history and Latino solidarity, on clubs appealing to gay students, and on photos of feminist icons like Susan B. Anthony, I think it would be reasonable to conclude that the policy was meant to telegraph that racial and sexual minorities, as well as women, are somehow not legitimate subjects for celebration, study, or solidarity. Looking at the removal of photos of Harriet Tubman and Susan B. Anthony, and of rainbows from classrooms, it would also be reasonable to conclude the policy reflected racist, homophobic, and misogynistic animus (what offense, exactly, did Harriet Tubman commit by risking her life to help slaves to freedom?). The lack of similar restrictions on white male figures would also be remarkable, and together with the actions noted above might be seen as reinforcing the idea that being straight and white is an unobjectionable, “normal” state of being. We might also suspect that the rules had been implemented in the interests of some larger purpose: maintaining certain hierarchies based on race and gender, by restricting recognition of anyone who fell outside what is considered “normal.”
And in fact, this very reality of anti-DEI efforts has already become clear in the Trump administration’s larger implementation of them across the federal government — leading Atlantic writer Adam Serwer to observe that they’ve become a smoke screen for re-instituting various forms of segregation and social repression across American government and society. From a more honest perspective, then, an equivalent way of saying “anti-DEI” is “anti-female, anti-Latino, anti-African-American, anti-gay, ant-atheist, anti-Muslim, and anti-Jewish” — and this is hardly an exhaustive list of the qualities that it views as unworthy. The anti-DEI push is nothing less than a crusade to repudiate the social progress of the 20th and 21st centuries, in favor of a regressive vision that puts unqualified white men like Secretary Hegseth at the top of the pyramid, a position from which they can then institute propaganda and erase history to support their self-serving racism and misogyny.
I would hazard that this reality is what the protesting kids intuited, if not saw outright, and that it caused them to react in the way any self-respecting American should: with revulsion, outrage, and defiance. And if they did not happen to be white, male, or straight, then on top of these other feelings, they would feel personally targeted by the measures — and they would not be wrong. After all, across the military, Hegseth has been terminating high-ranking African-American and female commanders on what appears to be no basis but their race or sex, while conducting an illegitimate campaign to eject trans service members from the armed services. It’s not wild to think that children of military members would be aware of these ongoing purges.
It’s in this denigration of youths for simply being who they are that we begin to grasp the full outrage of this war on military kids. And this outrage is magnified greatly by the way these children constitute a captive, vulnerable audience for such reactionary measures. While the opportunities for experiencing other countries and cultures can be deeply rewarding, living abroad can understandably also be quite challenging. Children who attend DODDS schools are often literally an ocean away from the United States, cut off from stateside friends and extended family, and from the culture with which they are familiar. In this context, DODDS schools provide a crucial grounding that is generally not experienced in the same way by the millions of American kids attending schools stateside. Being at school, with the connections to friends and to American culture it brings, is deeply important to the happiness and well-being of military children living overseas.
Given this context of vulnerability and the special role that their places of education play for the kids of service members, the decision by Hegseth to include DODDS schools in this reactionary anti-DEI crusade is particularly despicable. In ways not immediately apparent to those in the civilian world, the children of military members stationed overseas are cut off from the United States, often confined to a military base as their sole, limited contact with American culture. Actions to implement what is, to speak bluntly, a white supremacist, anti-gay, and misogynistic agenda is to act against a captive audience that cannot so easily seek alternative venues for learning and personal growth more generally. If you ban Black History Month at a school overseas (and on the base on which it’s located), then all the students are denied an experience that, had they been in the United States, they would have almost certainly experienced outside their school environment. If you ban clubs for Latino students, or for gay students, then those students have extremely limited options to find such outlets for camaraderie and support elsewhere. You are essentially cutting them off from basic freedoms that they would possess were they to reside in the United States.
The suppression of these kids’ right to free association strikes me as particularly sadistic and manipulative, and points to a larger danger in the making: that the Trump administration is effectively moving to enforce its deranged vision of America, and of “patriotic” education, on a captive audience of vulnerable kids who deserve much better. When we see these students protesting against affronts to their dignity, the quality of their education, and their rights, it is both a beacon of hope, but also a warning: we can’t just let the Trump administration have its way with their educations, or with their rights as American citizens.
Some Democrats have voiced outrage; Representative Gil Cisneros of California remarked that, “By taking away books, by minimizing curriculum, taking away materials, taking away cultural events, you take away that diversity and you take away the things that allows them to go out and achieve.” And Maryland’s Rep. Jamie Raskin has tweeted constituent complaints about the administrations’s attacks on DODDS students’ freedom to learn. Meanwhile, the European Parent Teacher Association has sent a letter to the House Armed Forces Subcommittee on Personnel asking that schools be given more time to comply with the anti-DEI directives, noting that “This lack of clarity is leading to widespread censorship, librarians being forced to remove books and clubs being canceled due to ‘possibly’ being out of compliance.”
But the fight to protect DODDS students from infringements on their freedom to learn, and from policies that disparage and isolate individuals based on characteristics like race, gender, or sexual orientation, deserves to be much better known among the public. It is an outrage upon the vulnerable that puts the moral turpitude of the Trump administration on vivid display. In attempting to make American kids abroad into test subjects for an education that views non-whites, non-males, and non-straights as aberrant and abnormal, the administration is engaging in abusive and unforgivable behavior. And I would not be surprised to see the Defense Department begin to push more explicitly for white supremacist and jingoistic curricula in DODDS schools.
Moreover, public attention can help ensure that no retaliation is enacted by the Trump administration against either protesting students or their military parents. Given the president’s obsession with retribution and hatred of those who fail to show him proper obeisance, such retaliation is a real possibility. Moreover, we should note that coverage of activities and protests within DODDS schools may face challenges of government censorship; for instance, an attempt by the Stars and Stripes military newspaper to cover the Okinawa protest on school grounds was rejected by the school system bureaucracy on flimsy grounds (the reason given was to protect the students from unauthorized photos, but obviously the paper could have reported from the scene while abiding by such restrictions).
Young Americans are sending up distress flares from abroad; we all need to take heed, while also taking heart from their acts of solidarity and defiance against immoral edicts from the reactionary Trump regime.