'We're all struggling with this': The Army's top enlisted service member opens up about race
Capehart
The Washington Post
4.6 • 1.4K Ratings
🗓️ 23 June 2020
⏱️ 31 minutes
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I'm Jonathan Cape Heart and this is Cape Up. |
| 0:04.7 | Sergeant Major Michael Grinstead is the highest ranking enlisted member of the |
| 0:09.1 | U.S. Army and he took to Twitter to share a very personal video message about race. |
| 0:15.0 | In our army we have to trust and understand one another. |
| 0:20.0 | We have to be willing to tell our stories. Here's part of my story. I was born in |
| 0:28.4 | 1968. My father was black, my mother was white. |
| 0:34.0 | When I was three, they divorced and I moved to Alabama. |
| 0:39.0 | Racial identity is something that I struggle with my entire life. |
| 0:45.0 | Coming to groups with both sides of my identity, |
| 0:47.0 | at one point I decided I would put black on the form. |
| 0:52.0 | And at that time I only had two choices. So I handed the form that I was given to the lady and she said that's not funny. |
| 1:01.0 | I said what are you talking about? She said you shouldn's not funny. I said, what are you talking about? |
| 1:03.3 | She said, you shouldn't mark that. |
| 1:05.2 | I said, well, I explained to her. |
| 1:07.4 | I was black and white. |
| 1:09.2 | I didn't have too many choices for anything else on that form. Sometimes my life I felt like it's in the movie |
| 1:18.0 | The Green Book where the actor gets out of the car and he says I'm not black enough for the black people and not white enough for the white people |
| 1:27.4 | That's my story |
| 1:30.3 | Hear more of his story right now. |
| 1:35.0 | Sergeant Major Michael Grinstead, thank you very much for being on the podcast. |
| 1:40.0 | Yes, sir. Thank you for hosting me and I look forward to the discussion. So you told CBS Sunday morning that your driver's license listed you as Caucasian. |
| 1:53.0 | When you enlisted in 1987 as a result of that, you checked Caucasian. |
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