Racial slurs at VMI 'a common experience' for Black cadets, investigators told

Virginia Military Institute students and graduates have told investigators that “it is and was a common experience to hear racial slurs among VMI cadets, including use of the n-word” over the past 25 years, according to an interim report issued Monday night by the law firm examining racism at the school.

The law firm of Barnes & Thornburg also revealed that VMI, the nation’s oldest state-supported military college, gave investigators a voluminous report detailing more than a dozen “substantiated” accounts of allegations involving a “racial component” since 2015. The 223-page document is titled “VMI Cadet Government Investigations with Racial Components from 2015 to 2020.”

And a VMI employee told investigators that a disproportionate number of African American cadets are targeted for prosecution by the school’s student-run Honor Court system and expelled for violations. The law firm offered no numbers, but The Washington Post reported in December that Black students made up 43 percent of those expelled between the fall of 2017 and the spring of 2020, though they represented just 6 percent of the student body.

Barnes & Thornburg, which is being paid $1 million for the state-ordered probe, acknowledged that it has spoken to far more VMI graduates — 46, as of March 1 — than current students. As of March 5, its investigators have interviewed only five cadets out of 12 who have agreed to talk.

Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/racial-slurs-vmi-investigation/2021/03/08/6fd22af8-8050-11eb-81db-b02f0398f49a_story.html