But during her two months in Kansas City, Cook came under a different kind of attack. She began her duties on November 27, with a training session in Jefferson City that lasted several hours. The next day she reported to the front line, standing guard at an airport gate with a 9 mm pistol and forty rounds of ammunition on her belt. She had no problems with the passengers, though they grumbled when forced to part with their tweezers or more lethal-looking hair clips. She got along fine with the baggage screeners, though she was watching to make sure they stopped every bag on the X-ray machine and conducted thorough random passenger checks.
Cook's battle was with other members of the Missouri National Guard, some of whom clearly did not want her there because she was black. She noticed that some of the white soldiers ignored the black sergeant who was in charge of her twelve-hour shift. Other discrimination was more subtle. "If you are a person of race, you can sense when somebody [who is a racist] is around you," says Cook, who asked that her real name not be used for this article. "You can taste it. You can smell it. It's weird."
In the airport's break room, she once heard a guardsman from her unit say, "We're going to get the niggers out of here. They don't belong here." That same guardsman complained about Cook, saying she had made inappropriate sexual comments about the bulletproof vests being too tight for her breasts (something Cook admits she said privately to a roommate in the Guard's airport break room). Cook believes this soldier filed complaints against her so she would be removed from airport duty. "He had a problem with me ever since I came into that unit," Cook says.
She can tally other slights. Cook and the only other black female on her shift roomed together at the Chase Suite hotel, and their room was significantly smaller than the rooms assigned to white soldiers. Some of the white guardsmen dated baggage screeners and were not disciplined for the breach of policy, Cook says. She, however, earned a written rebuke when a screener brought flowers to her hotel room unsolicited. After five write-ups (one when, against objections from a senior officer, she insisted on calling police to investigate a sword in a traveler's trunk), Cook's commander relieved her from duty and sent her home. Taken separately, the incidents might have seemed small; together, Cook feels they add up to racism. Cook's feelings about the Guard have changed. She dreads her next weekend of drills.
"I wasn't treated right," Cook says. "A lot of people weren't treated right."
The Missouri National Guard has a documented problem with race, created in part by a volatile mix of Guard members from the predominately white rural parts of the state and blacks from the cities. In 2000, a survey found that the Guard failed to promote minorities to leadership positions at the same rates as white men, and 10 percent of the Guard members said they had observed racial discrimination. The results of that survey were widely publicized in Jefferson City, where the Missouri National Guard has its headquarters, and in the Columbia Tribune, and they were posted on the Guard's Web site, along with a promise from then-Adjutant General John Havens that the organization would "improve communications and address many of the adverse perceptions."
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Listen -- please. I served (20 Plus] years of active duty. Simply promote the smartest/most qualified IRR-REGARDLESS of color. This will obviously upset those who feel affirmative action is the answer but when I see female Black Cops looting a WalMart in La.; after Katrina I've formed opinions which are best for the nation.
The best qualified are always the best answer. Test all and select the best on the same ruler...
Listen -- please. I served (20 Plus] years of active duty. Simply promote the smartest/most qualified IRR-REGARDLESS of color. This will obviously upset those who feel affirmative action is the answer but when I see female Black Cops looting a WalMart in La.; after Katrina I've formed opinions which are best for the nation. The best qualified are always the best answer. Test all and select the best on the same ruler...
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