Testimony - Kendall Qualls

Testimony from member of the Military Readiness and Merit Coalition, Kendall Qualls, former US Army Captain and President of TakeCharge. He had made plans to travel from Minnesota to attend the May 2024 DACODAI meeting in person in Arlington, VA until DACODAI canceled the public from attending in-person.

Transcript

General, thank you so much for having me. I’m glad to be here.

I want to address this issue that’s going on in our country in three different ways.

Number one is my personal testimony of my family. My father-in-law and my father, both men of the Jim Crow south, they lived through segregation. They lived through the worst of the things that we’ve read about in our history books. But they both joined the military.

In fact, my father-in-law joined when the Army was still segregated in 1947. As you know from the history, a year later, President Truman desegregated the armed forces and he stayed in the military throughout his career. He served in Korea. He was in the ‘Frozen Chosen’ in the infantry during his career.

He also served in combat in Vietnam, as well as my father, he served 25 years. So both men, one finished his career after 30 years as the highest rank in the listed ranks of command. Sergeant Major an E-9, and my father an E-8.

When I went on active duty and commissioned as a young officer with my gold bars, they could not have been more proud to be there to see that happen.

After five years, I decided to transition, not just make a military career, but into civilian sector. They urged me, “Kendall, do not do this! You don’t know what that world is like, like we do. The military is the only place where you’re going to get a fair shake, where you’ll be judged on merit, you’ll be promoted on merit, you can have a successful career.”

But I was a child of the post-civil rights movement. We were the first generation to actually be able to purchase a home, go to school, get a job, and every factor in every sector of America that they could not.

I had a very successful career at Fortune 100 company. I finished my career after 30 years in the healthcare industry, finishing as the global Vice President of a Fortune 50 company with a responsibility of $850 million business unit.

They were so proud to actually see that happen because they never thought we as black Americans could actually achieve that.

And so I share that with you. This was an important factor because the executive recruiting segment of our country, those basically called headhunters, they knew that the military was the place that could qualified leaders that can go into the civilian sector and transition and be successful.

This idea of diversity and doing it right, the military, the armed forces, was the place that was an example for the rest of the country.

DEI, what we’re hearing now, is not something that they trying to make it sound like, well, we really need to do this and we’re starting from ground zero.

That is a falsehood. That is deception, and it’s an outright lie. It’s so unfortunate what’s happening.

We’ve been doing diversity the right way, the merit based way, the opportunity for quality for everyone way ever since 1948. The idea that we need to do this as a heightened emergency is such a falsehood.

The second part of my message around this is that they’re using the racial disparities to justify this issue, and they’re using the racial disparities in such a disingenuous way.

I’ll give it to you based on the information I’ve been able to research over the last five years.

Yes, we have significant disparities in our country. Economic disparities, academic achievement, professional. We see it in our professional ranks as well as armed forces, as well as corporate attorneys and doctors.

The reason we have these disparities is because of social welfare programs that were introduced to the United States.

It was an artificial insertion into a culture that didn’t exist prior to the social welfare programs of the great society.

I’ll give an example from, just from the fact based information. When I was five years old, 80% of black families were two parent families. Children born at that time, 80% of them were born in two parent families.

Today, 80% of them are born in fatherless homes to unwed mothers.

This did not used to happen. This was a cultural transformation that started in the late 1960s, early 1970s.

Without one initiative to reverse the trend, we can’t fix things at the Department of Defense on the top end, with forcing racial parity.

When we have a bottom end problem in a social culture that we want to ignore, we shouldn’t be ignoring these things.

This is what our organization TakeCharge does. We started about four years ago. We have over 50 volunteers in the state of Minnesota. We just launched our first chapter outside the state of Minnesota, in Memphis, Tennessee, because the same problems exist there. All over the country, all major cities.

80% to 90% of kids are born without a father in a home. This is not sustainable for any culture, and we’ve ignored it for a significant amount of time.

And I can tell you there’s a significant percentage of black Americans that want this resolved.

So, for example, we poll. We do a nationwide poll every year for the last two years. The majority of black Americans believe that the government should be incentivizing two parent families instead of single parent homes, which right now, they’re financially supporting, as well as school choice for parents.

When I say significant percentage of black Americans, 52% of black Americans agreed with the recent Supreme Court decision that racial preferences should be eliminated for college admissions, 52%.

Well, we rarely hear from those 52%. This is what our organization is doing. We’re going to be the champion, the platformer, and the voice for everyday Americans, including black Americans, to get back to the sense of our cultural roots that was rooted in faith, rooted in family, and rooting in education, getting a better education for kids.

This merit-based philosophy is what has just generated so much goodwill in our country. Right after the civil rights movement, it was great, I get to be judged as an American because I want to contribute.

I want to bring honor to our culture that sacrificed so much in the past to be able to achieve the things we achieved and what the Department of Defense should do right now.