Heather Wolf Keller

Hey Jasmine… Black pilot here. I think you missed the plot. Then again, that’s becoming a pattern. I graduated from West Point. I went through Army flight school. I learned to fly the AH-64 Apache. I deployed to combat and flew 55 combat missions over Baghdad. Nobody handed me a cockpit because of my skin color. Nobody lowered the standards for me. Nobody looked at me and said, “Let’s check a diversity box.” That’s what people like you don’t seem to understand. Suggesting that Black pilots, Black engineers, Black doctors, or Black leaders need special preferences to succeed is not empowering, it’s insulting. I didn’t want a different standard. I wanted the same standard. And when you’re flying into combat, the American people don’t care what race the pilot is. They care whether the pilot is qualified. Merit isn’t racist. Excellence isn’t discriminatory. And reducing every achievement to skin color says far more about your worldview than it does about mine.