A Black woman who serves as an officer in the U.S. Army has come out with allegations of racism that paint a disturbing picture of the culture Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has helped harbor at the Pentagon.
The allegations raise fresh questions about the military’s treatment of Black personnel — in particular, Black women — amid bigoted attacks on diversity by Hegseth and his underlings.
They also raise questions about the supposed “top-down cultural shift” Hegseth has vowed to oversee among military chaplains — essentially, spiritual guides — whom the secretary has derided for offering service members “emotional support.”
Army Capt. Tatyana Jordan spoke with Military.com about what she faced after experiencing what she interpreted as a racist threat from Chaplain Maj. Edward Blackledge, Jordan’s supervisor at the Army’s Institute for Religious Leadership:
According to Jordan, on Aug. 13, 2025, her supervisor, Chaplain Maj. Edward Blackledge, instructed a religious affairs noncommissioned officer (NCO) to patch a hole in the office they all shared. The NCO was suffering from an injury to his arm or hand that made the project difficult for days on end.
Due to being unable to execute the task and cut into the drywall, Jordan volunteered to do it instead and said she would still complete her TRADOC (U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command) analysis for later that same afternoon.
That was when Blackledge allegedly said the following to her: ‘You need to focus on getting that spreadsheet done before the meeting or I’ll need to tie you to a tree and beat you.’
During the era of chattel slavery, enslaved Black people were often tied to trees and whipped as a form of racist torture, which their slave drivers used to bring them into submission.
Jordan said she would “never forget” her supervisor’s statement, telling Military.com that it evoked thoughts of anti-Black lynchings:
This was not said in isolation. It was said by a senior leader, in uniform, in a professional Army environment. As a Black woman, that statement carried a weight far beyond the words themselves. It evoked a deeply painful and violent history in this country: lynching, racial terror, and the dehumanization of people who look like me.
Jordan also told Military.com that Blackledge told her at the time that he was “joking,” but that she still reported the incident to military police. She said the police chalked up the comments to being a “bad joke” and that a call to the Army’s inspector general’s office made clear that “IG wanted nothing to do” with the situation.
The Defense Department did not immediately respond to MS NOW’s request for comment.
Military.com got access to an investigative report the Army conducted on the alleged incident. The outlet notes that the report, which MS NOW has not independently confirmed, includes a sworn statement from Blackledge claiming he “never made racial jokes” about anyone in the Army. He apparently went on to say he didn’t remember making the “tie you to a tree” remark before conceding he told Jordan he would have to “punch her in the face.”
According to the report:
‘I do not recall making the statement, ‘I need to tie you to a tree and beat you,’’ Blackledge said in his statement. ‘I’m not denying that I said it, but I do not recall making that statement. I do recall telling CPT Jordan, in jest, that I would have to punch her in the face if she did not complete a specific project on time. I may have made the alleged statement during the same conversation.’
Here, we see a prime example showing why — at minimum — the U.S. military is in dire need of the very diversity, equity and inclusion efforts that people like Hegseth have long decried. The defense secretary and his allies would have us believe that the U.S. military and its leadership are naturally sensible and at risk of distraction by conversations about properly welcoming women and nonwhite people into the ranks.
But that doesn’t square with the story of a female Black Army captain being intimidated with a threat that sounds eerily close to slave torture.
Ja’han Jones is an MS NOW opinion blogger. He previously wrote The ReidOut Blog.