West Point Black Power Salute

If the current turmoil over the meaning and appropriateness of a photographed gesture made by uniformed African-American female West Point cadets is to be rationally considered, it needs to be viewed rationally through the prism of modern American history and culture. Within this context , not only do I defend these West Point women, I EMPHATICALLY AND EFFUSIVELY APPLAUD THEM! And the West Point leadership hierarchy should do likewise. Over the five decades since the “Olympic Project for Human Rights” gesture by Tommie Smith and John Carlos at the 1968 Mexico Olympics, the “raised clenched fist” has entered the pantheon of AFRICAN-AMERICAN GENERALIZED GESTURES OF CULTURAL EXPRESSION relating to consciousness of struggle, commitment to purpose, and determination to prevail – both individually and collectively.

Given the challenges that cadets – and female cadets in particular – must surmount to progress and graduate from West Point, the very notion, the presumption that the raised fist gesture among these young adult African-American women is freighted with any of the odious and utterly objectionable implications and imagery as the Nazi salute is insanely ludicrous. Simple common sense should compel the understanding that were they of such a state of mind and political disposition, they would not have sought appointment to and enrolled at West Point in the first place. And they most certainly would not have persevered through graduation.