My parents’ life stories served as a poignant warning about America’s racism toward its black citizens. It was a warning that came before the Fayetteville police pulled me, shirtless, at 16, from my car in the pouring rain. I was handcuffed and detained on suspicion that my girlfriend and I were using crack cocaine, when in fact we were only rounding third base. It was before a West Point classmate said that I should be spending the night in the “5th Regiment” — a nonexistent unit meant to refer to black cadets and, in this case, to imply that I had no place in the Academy’s four student regiments. Before a white woman I dated told me her family wouldn’t accept a black baby. Before this sergeant and I stood face to face in Iraq.

As grating as his comment was, he had voiced what surely was a common experience for many white soldiers. I was one of only 67 blacks to graduate with my West Point class of 965 cadets; one of no more than three black officers in my first battalion in Korea; and again one of the few black officers in my unit when it deployed to Iraq. Wherever I went, I couldn’t help noticing the Army’s significant deficit of black officers. The sergeant didn’t seem hostile or demeaning. If anything, his voice seemed to waver, as if he were in that moment beginning to realize how racism not only negatively affects people of color but white people as well — how it causes them to buy into false narratives that legitimate institutions have perpetuated to advance white supremacy since our country’s founding.

In 1925, the Army War College summarized a study of black soldiers in a memo titled “Employment of Negro Man Power in War.” “In the process of evolution the American Negro has not progressed as far as the other sub-species of the human family,” the document states. “As a race he has not developed leadership qualities. His mental inferiority and the inherent weaknesses of his character are factors that must be considered with great care in the preparation of any plan for his employment in war.” Among its conclusions was this: “Negro officers should not be placed over white officers, noncommissioned officers or soldiers.”

The military that produced this document is the same military in which many black Americans have served and died — an Army that has now had its first black commander in chief and that just hired West Point’s first black superintendent since its founding in 1802. But that memo also distills our country’s conventional wisdom, which has variously justified slavery, Jim Crow, segregation, redlining and the mass incarceration of black Americans.