LaShawn Barber via Smitty

It seems the Naval Academy performed some real-life photoshopping. Academy leaders removed two white men from the color guard line-up for a performance at the recent World Series and replaced them with a “non-white” man and a white woman for purposes of diversity.

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But here’s the twist: the “non-white” man forgot part of his uniform and had to be replaced. The line-up was all-white, anyway, and the Naval Academy ended up with bad PR.

Other midshipmen and alumni complained about the apparent diversity shuffle. After the requisite he said/he said exchanges, where an academy spokesman denied that the school pulled the men because they were white, despite a press release apparently contradicting him, brigade commanders issued a gag order forbidding midshipmen to talk about the controversy to outsiders.

Navy Times

Two white, male members of the color guard learned Oct. 28 they were being replaced with a white woman, Midshipman 2nd Class Hannah Allaire, and a non-white man, Midshipman 2nd Class Zishan Hameed, on orders of the school’s administration, according to an internal e-mail message provided to Navy Times by an academy professor. With a national television audience, Naval Academy leadership worried the color guard it planned to send wasn’t diverse enough, the e-mail said.

However, after the color guard arrived in New York for the game Oct. 29, Hameed, whose family is from Pakistan, realized he had left his dress shoes and cover in Annapolis. Midshipman 1st Class Aaron Stroud regained his place and served as a rifleman for the presentation of the colors. Allaire carried the other rifle and the four original members marched with the flags.

Naval Academy spokesman Cmdr. Joe Carpenter responded to questions about the midshipmen replacements in a written statement Thursday after the color guard story was first reported on the blog “CDR Salamander.”

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Academy officials actually sent an eight-person color guard to the baseball game, Klunder said, but the full squad couldn’t perform after Hameed forgot part of his uniform, because color guards need an even number of members. So it wasn’t that the academy administration yanked members of the color guard because they were white men, it’s that Hameed’s “uniform inventory problem,” as Klunder called it, meant that only six mids could march, instead of eight.

But a Naval Academy press release on the morning of the game said six mids were presenting the colors at the World Series, and identified them all by name.

WaPo

Klunder said he met afterward with the two midshipmen who could not participate because of the forgotten garments “to discuss the sequence of events and improve on any communication breakdowns or misperceptions that were experienced.”

About the ensuing controversy, Klunder said: “It is regretful that assumptions were made” by the six midshipmen who asked to march at Yankee Stadium, “but it has been and will remain the Naval Academy leadership’s prerogative” to decide who carries the flag.

CDR Salamander has more here, here, and here.

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