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Federal Overhaul is a multipart series that explores the impact of the Trump administration’s restructuring of the federal government on Black communities.
ARLINGTON, Virginia — “Not right now, baby girl. Now’s not the time for you.”
That was the advice that Tavorise Marks, who served in the U.S. Army for 15 years, recently had for his niece. An honors graduate of her high school’s Navy Junior Reserve Officers Training Corps program, she dreamed of joining the military.
But Marks, 42, who grew up in the city of Richmond and in Brunswick County in Virginia, doesn’t believe that the military is a particularly safe or tolerant environment for Black Americans right now.
As the Trump administration purges the U.S. Armed Forces of Black senior officers, decries diversity, and engages in military operations in the Caribbean that raise moral concerns for those in uniform, some Black veterans, including Marks, are encouraging prospective service members to find another career path, if they can. Others think that Black Americans should still enlist, believing that it could be dangerous to cede the military to the current administration.
This February, President Donald Trump suddenly fired Charles Q. Brown Jr., a retired U.S. Air Force general and the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
His removal came several months after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth laid out his plans for rooting out diversity, equity, and inclusion in the federal government: “First of all, you’ve got to fire the chairman of the Joint Chiefs,” he said in 2024. Hegseth succeeded Lloyd Austin, who was the first Black defense secretary.
In May, Hegseth ordered all military leaders to pull and review their library books that address diversity, anti-racism, or gender.
In September, he announced 10 new directives that would shift the military’s culture away from what he called “woke garbage” and toward a “warrior ethos.”
“No more identity months, DEI offices, or dudes in dresses,” he told a room full of admirals and generals. “No more climate change worship. No more division, distraction of gender delusions. No more debris. As I’ve said before and will say, we are done with that.”
And in November, media reports indicated that the U.S. Coast Guard would stop classifying nooses and Swastikas as hate symbols. It quickly changed course after facing backlash.
This turbulent reality fills Marks with anger and disappointment. The opportunity to follow in his grandfather and great-uncle’s footsteps by serving in the military had long been a source of profound joy for him.
“It just gave me a strong sense of pride and belonging,” Marks, who was a military police officer and a military intelligence officer, told Capital B. “I felt proud every time I put on my uniform, and I felt proud having the American flag on my right sleeve.”
The military also provided him with professional development and security — the sort that Black federal workers, more broadly, have benefited from for generations: “It was like the grandparent I never had because of Jim Crow,” as one former U.S. Navy commander previously told Capital B.
Black Americans are overrepresented in the Armed Forces, accounting for about 17% of active-duty military personnel but roughly14% of the total U.S. population.
“I saw the benefits of the leadership schools that [the Army] sent me to in order to build skills, as well as the financial stability,” Marks said. “I knew that I had a paycheck coming on the first and the 15th of every month. I knew that my health care was taken care of. I knew that if anything happened to me, my family would be taken care of.”
Not every moment of Marks’ military career was rosy. He remembers when he was a young lieutenant — around 23 or 24 years old — and a white soldier called him Sambo, a racial slur. Marks was infuriated, but when he brought the matter to the attention of a senior officer, he was told that the man probably didn’t mean any harm. Marks felt that he had no choice but to drop the issue.
Brown also has spoken about the challenges of being a Black American in the military.
“I’m thinking about wearing the same flight suit with the same wings on my chest as my peers and then being questioned by another military member, ‘Are you a pilot?’” Brown, who was the first Black American to lead a branch of the Armed Forces, said in 2020 after the murder of George Floyd.
Even with the hurdles, the military allowed Marks to grow in important ways. And it frustrates him, he said, that someone as controversial as Hegseth has so much control over the military. His power is second only to Trump, the commander in chief.
“Hegseth, in my opinion, is the kind of white guy who has a small personality but wants to seem big, strong, and tough,” Marks said. “People like that can be very dangerous. That’s evident in some of the actions they’ve taken. I never thought that I would see the National Guard being deployed outside of a national disaster or emergency.”
Trump has suggested that cities such as Chicago should be used as “training grounds for our military.” Hegseth has continued to defend the administration’s actions, including the boat strikes that have killed more than 80 people.
Following a reported clash with Hegseth over the strikes, Alvin Holsey, who was the first Black commander of the U.S. Southern Command, abruptly stepped down.
For Deimos James, the military was a mixed bag. James, 30, was in the Army for nine years, and worked first as a computer technologist and then as a cybersecurity analyst.
James, who’s nonbinary, was drawn to the military out of need. Their family wasn’t accepting of their identity when they were younger, and they had only one of two choices when it was time to decide what to do with their life: attempt to attend college without financial support from their family, or join the military.
James said that they were harassed by a non-commissioned officer, but a lot of good still came out of their military experience. They got to travel all over the world, they met some of their closest friends, and they fell in love with a sport that they still play years later: roller derby.
“I started playing roller derby in 2018, when I was stationed at Fort Liberty [in North Carolina],” James, who lives in Richmond, told Capital B, explaining that they became enthralled by the sport after they saw skaters at a Pride event. “I’ve been doing it ever since.”
James was part of a Black roller derby organization called Black Diaspora Roller Derby. They eventually helped to establish BWA Roller Derby, or Black [Skaters] With Attitude Roller Derby, a Virginia-based nonprofit group for Black skaters.
“I wanted to create a space where we not only focus on derby but also actually build an intentional community where everyone takes care of one another,” they said.
And though James isn’t surprised by the controversy beleaguering the military today — given that they served with people they said had archaic, racist views — they are disappointed. This institution that allowed James to forge lifelong relationships is now tainted, and deeply so.
Marks’ barbershop is across the street from the Fort Lee/Fort Gregg-Adams Army base, about 30 miles from Richmond. He goes there every couple of weeks.
Amid the sounds of clippers and music, there’s talk among some current Black soldiers. And a common theme that Marks hears is that many are going to retire in the next year or so, or they’re just not going to reenlist.
The Black veterans Capital B spoke with were divided on whether they would encourage prospective service members to join the military in the current political climate.
Marks said that his niece has as much of a right as anyone else to serve her country. But given the precarious state of things for Black Americans right now, he can’t in good conscience prompt her to join, he said. At the moment, she’s working a part-time job and going to school, waiting for the tide to turn.
James underscored what they see as a more moral dimension of whether to join the military.
“It’s not just saying the quiet part out loud — a lot of the federal occupation of the states is illegal,” they said, referring to a judge’s recent ruling that Trump’s deployment of the National Guard to heavily Black Washington, D.C., was illegal. “So you now have a very public moral choice to make, and I don’t know if the benefits [of joining] are worth it.”
For those who are already serving, James noted a possible course of action.
“If you’re in the military and you’re given unlawful orders, you have an oath to disobey those orders and report them,” they said. “There are resources for that, and people to help you.”
Richard Brookshire — the co-founder and CEO of the Black Veterans Project, a nonprofit organization that seeks to address racial inequality in access to benefits for veterans — has a different view of the situation.
Brookshire, 38, who served as an infantry combat medic in the Army for around seven years, told Capital B that he doesn’t believe that he’s in a position to tell young Black Americans trying to chart a path to the middle class to avoid the military. It’s one of the few institutions that has traditionally strengthened Black access to housing, health care, job training, and more.
“What I would tell them is that they need to connect with community, seek out mentorship, and build allyship to survive in the military,” said Brookshire, a veteran of the war in Afghanistan. “It’s always been a racially hostile climate, but I don’t think that this is a time to discourage people from fighting for progress — progress gained by many generations of Black service members. They have a legacy to carry on.”
Brookshire, who’s gay, is intimately familiar with this hostile environment. When he was stationed in Germany, there were soldiers who would openly read Mein Kampf and espouse racist, sexist, and homophobic rhetoric, he said.
In a statement, a Pentagon official told Capital B that the agency “remains committed to recruiting and retaining the talent we need to achieve peace through strength” and that it is “focused on building on our recent military recruiting gains and continuing to meet our military recruiting mission.”
The official also said that “we strive to provide merit-based, color-blind opportunities to all of our service members,” noting that “our veterans are important advocates for these opportunities and for military service more broadly.”
Marks feels that, prior to this year, the military had meaningfully improved over the past couple of decades and become a more cohesive unit — one where vulnerable groups were embraced more than they ever had been before.
The repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” in 2011, for instance, allowed service members to be open about their sexuality.
“We have this saying: We don’t see color — we see Army green. I really believed that. I felt that, because the military used to be a hotbed of white nationalism,” Marks said. “But I think that we’re going back in that direction now.”
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Brandon Tensley is Capital B's national politics reporter. More by Brandon Tensley
Capital B is a Black-led, nonprofit local and national news organization reporting for Black communities across the country.
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