After reading that references to Jackie Robinson, who broke the color barrier in baseball, were deleted from US Military websites, as part of the Trump Administration’s war against DEI and then restored after some outcry, I wondered if anything happened to stories about Asian Americans on these websites. We have written about how certain clubs at the West Point Army Academy were banned. Apparently references to the Japanese American 442nd infantry regiment were taken down on March 14 and then restored. But what about other notable Asian Americans in US Military History?
I checked on some of the Asian Americans veterans we have written about in the past. We wrote about Medal of Honor winner Telesforo Trinidad, and this story about him on the US Department of Defense website is still there. Lau Sing Kee, a World War I Distinguished Service Cross winner, is still in that war’s list of Distinguished Service Cross winners. The story of Hazel Ying Lee, the World War II WASP pilot who died doing military work, is still there on an Air Force Web site.
I suspect that going forward, the lists of medal winners are going to be preserved, but detailed stories about racial and gender pioneers in the military are going to be deleted. We will keep an eye on some of these URLs over the next few months to see if they are altered or deleted.
