As a Black woman, a veteran, and a proud citizen of a country I served with honor, I know intimately the weight of injustice that underrepresented communities continue to bear. Despite the promises etched into our Constitution and echoed in the speeches of our leaders, racism and caste have remained deeply entrenched pillars of American society. Today, I stand on the shoulders of my ancestors, the front lines of service, and the experiences of countless others to call out these enduring inequities with both urgency and hope.

Racism: America’s Original Sin

James Baldwin once wrote, “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” Racism in America is not merely an unfortunate chapter in our past; it is a living, breathing structure built with bricks of pain, silence, and indifference. From the founding of this nation, built on the backs of enslaved Africans, to the systemic inequities we see today, racism has been a persistent force that shapes every aspect of American identity.

After risking my life in uniform, I returned to a country where my color and gender still made me second-class. Where even in VA hospitals, I witnessed disparities in the care given to veterans of color, women, and those of young age like my 20 year old self being batted away with “you’re fine”. I will never forget the unspoken feeling of begging for something I was ashamed to admit to in the first place…I was hurting. I was young, yes, but coping with the trauma and the underlying physical effects of war were beyond the scope of my young worldly knowledge. I also noted the educational systems, job markets, and housing practices still reeked of exclusion as I searched for a path forward. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. famously warned that the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. Yet that bending requires more than patience—it requires pressure. It demands action from each of us, particularly from those who have benefited most from an unjust status quo.

Caste: The Invisible Hierarchy

Isabel Wilkerson, in her seminal book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, brilliantly reveals that America’s racial divisions are not just about prejudice—they are about a deeply embedded caste system. A caste system that assigns value based on arbitrary characteristics, confining people to roles they did not choose and denying them opportunities based on their “assigned place” in society.

As a Black veteran woman, I have lived the paradox: honored and saluted for my service abroad, yet diminished and marginalized at home. This is caste at work. It is a silent law that dictates that no matter how educated, decorated, or accomplished we are, Blackness places us on a lower rung of the social ladder. When combining Blackness and woman-ness, it is a quiet tyranny that strips away layers of opportunity and access.

Injustice in Underrepresented Communities

Injustice today wears many faces. It looks like food deserts in predominantly Black, Brown and poor neighborhoods. It looks like a criminal justice system that disproportionately incarcerates people of color and poor people found on the lower rungs of the caste system. It looks like environmental racism found in Flint, Michigan, socioeconomic disparity in the healthcare system and an education system rooted in school-to-prison pipelines.

Langston Hughes asked, “What happens to a dream deferred?” We know the answer—it sags, it festers, it explodes. When communities are underrepresented in decision-making, denied resources, and silenced in political processes, the very fabric of democracy begins to unravel. This is why race and caste are as important to American ideology as capitalism is to its perceived success as a world superpower.

Underrepresentation is not an accident; it is the result of deliberate policies and societal choices. It is past time to confront these injustices not with pity or platitudes but with decisive, intentional action. Representation is more than optics—it is about power, voice, and agency. Of which we have in abundance.

A Call to Action

I carry with me the spirit of Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, and the countless unnamed Black women who fought battles far harder than mine with far fewer resources.

As a community, we must educate ourselves about the realities of racism and caste because there is a current white-washing of history, facts, and a scrubbing out of truth that threatens to impact our children’s children understanding of America’s beginning, its dark underbelly and hopefully, its triumphant rise to become the success story of the founding father’s “great experiment”. We must hold our leaders accountable—not just with votes, but with our voices and wallets. Target and Tesla have been examples of this power. The national protests, in sync, voices raising high into the sky to create one national voice are reminiscent of how change rippled across the nation decades ago.

America has often been called the “land of the free,” but freedom is not the absence of chains alone—it is the full realization of one’s humanity through equitable treatment. There is an important ending to the motto many may forget… “home of the brave.” We are a nation of fighters, innovators, empathizers, and warriors. The Constitution is the founding principle of our modern melting pot, but also a guide to a more perfect union.

As veterans, citizens, and believers in the ideal of a more perfect union, we are called to be the builders of that world.

Breaking the chains of injustice requires resilience and strength from those in chains but also empathy and bravery of those who are not.