I first came to know Ariel Joiner as a no-bs, critically thinking classmate in K.J. Hickerson’s course titled The Work of the Past. Joiner enlivened class discussions as she exposed sloppily curated art exhibitions. After Ruby Bridges’s appearance at UChicago’s MLK Day commemoration, Joiner gave us her own Civil Rights History teach-in. Joiner pointed out how the self-organized teens of the Little Rock Nine had been passed over in popular discourse, while Ruby became an icon because she was taken up as the image of an innocent kid caught in the crossfire. Outside of class, I found find out that she is the first Black woman to take part in UChicago’s veteran recruitment program. In front of Cobb Hall, Joiner dished out funny stories and hard truths from her years in the navy as an aviation boatswain’s mate—a highly technical position responsible for launching and recovering naval aircrafts. I learned she hailed from a small town: Dumas, Arkansas.
The more I learned of Joiner’s journey, the more I came to believe she embodied a timely counternarrative to Trumpies who have whined about DEI’s harms. She served her nation, and her fresh, distinct perspective on the world was surely a boon to UChicago students and teachers. I asked to interview Joiner about Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s ugly, stupid campaign against “DEI” initiatives in the military. I wondered if she identified with the qualified minority leaders, Joint Chief of Staff C.Q. Brown and Vice Admiral Shoshana Chatfield, who had been stripped of their command roles. I assumed the Pentagon’s erasure of documentary media on the Tuskegee Airmen and an all-women Air Force crew—part of “anti-DEI” scour of government databases—surely felt like a diss to all veterans and active soldiers of color?
Joiner approached the Department of Government Efficiency changes this year clear-eyed: “There hasn’t ever been DEI in the military.” She brought attention to the fact that ill-fitting uniforms are a clear example of the lack of equity: “My flight deck uniform was a men’s uniform, and I would just have to get a size up, even with boots.” Per Joiner, the notion that women in the navy had managed to consolidate power was silly. Female sailors have been engaged in an ongoing struggle: “[we have been] trying to rise, change the policies, and help ourselves.”
Joiner recalled her fellow women service members’ disappointment when one promising woman sailor rejected the high-up warrant officer position. She noted the importance of this position, outlining that there’s roughly four to 10 available in the entire navy at a time, and that there hadn’t been a female warrant officer since approximately 2001. One woman during Joiner’s term had the shot at “making warrant.” This officer’s decision to have a baby and put her promotion on hold became a public affair throughout the navy.
“Now, she wasn’t on the ship with me, but the fact that I knew that she was pregnant, points to how it was such a big deal. You know, in normal society, having a baby is a celebration. To us, it was like, ‘why would you do that to us?’ You’re not going to let another one of us get in this position,” Joiner recounted.
The deep support for that woman officer to stay in power, according to Joiner, brought home how much women sailors still stood to gain. Yet Joiner noted that it was unfair for that officer had to be burdened with representing her women peers; that officer had the right to a private life, to make a family.
Joiner allowed that white male officers didn’t exercise complete rule. But she underscored that pragmatism, not idealism, informs the military’s diverse command structure: “In the middle of the ocean, you cannot worry about if there are enough women, or Black people, or Chinese [people] on the ship because, at the end of the day, this is a war event.”
Joiner imagined true “DEI” initiatives in the military looking like facilitating sailors’ advanced certifications. She had been shadowing a welder in the navy, hoping to become one herself, but Joiner was stymied by a policy that discounted sailor’s future careers: “[The navy] doesn’t want to pay for certain certifications because they want to get their money’s worth.” Joiner talked back to Hegseth’s blabber that the army’s “warrior culture” was diminished by recruitment of minorities. She recalled people of color’s real presence in the military, but she insisted racial capitalism, not DEI outreach, was responsible on this front: “I’ll say that more African Americans, Latino, or Caribbean Americans are in the military now because it is a job that provides insurance and stability. You can take care of your family. It’s one of the only pension jobs left.”
Joiner reminded me, nevertheless, that when you come down to it, “[the navy] is a low-end job.” She remembers her first meager paycheck exactly: “$561.45. So that was after two weeks of being in boot camp. I had a 24-hour job, but I still qualified for food stamps.” (She mentioned too that she couldn’t even take advantage of provision for low-income Americans as an active service member.) Yet, Joiner differentiates herself from other sailors who enlisted out of self-preservation. She came across sailors from Louisiana who had opted for military service instead of jail time. She referenced immigrants who had enlisted to help expedite their citizenship requests.
Joiner’s insight on the military is matched by her sharp perception of UChicago, the next (civilian) institution she’s navigated. “UChicago is a different type of weird,” Joiner told me. “I’m happy I’m here, but sometimes I feel like I’m here to remind rich people that normal everyday people exist.” In first year hum, Joiner puzzled over her classmates as they read The Iliad. Her peers couldn’t conceive of romance between Achilles and Patroclus. The students over-analyzed the two heroes’ relationship; Joiner argued, “[Homer] is talking about sex. And then we went to a seminar and the professor said that it was a love story. And I was looking at the class like, ‘I told y’all so.’”
Joiner is an economics major now. One recent course struck her as particularly out of touch. “I’m in a tax class looking at Elon Musk’s taxes; no, let’s do a poor person’s taxes!,” she said. “That’s the thing about UChicago. I feel like students are getting taught how to be in the top 1 percent.”
She joked, “Maybe that’s one of the reasons why UChicago is in the hood, to give them social skills or something?” But Joiner has real worries that UChicago students can be “so intelligent [that they’re almost removed] from the real world.” Ariel was quick to caveat that she had no illusions that she was all-knowing.
I was drawn to Joiner’s story because I imagined her as a sort of avatar of the Black South. I saw her military service and sacrifice in the tradition of African American soldiers’ active citizenship—their efforts to realize American democracy. I was inspired to reach out to Joiner partly because I was reading Omo Moses’s family memoir, The White Peril. Omo is the son of Bob Moses, Freedom Summer organizer and Algebra Project founder. Omo’s book, which bounds from Tanzania to Cambridge, places the South as his family’s heartland and, in turn, as America’s. The White Peril revolves around Omo’s discovery of his family’s legacy of civil rights activism. Sermons delivered by Omo’s radical reverend grandfather preface each chapter. Bob Moses’ reflections on organizing in the Deep South run alongside Omo’s own account of his experience working with students and their teachers in Mississippi who had partnered with the Algebra Project. My reading and trip to Catholic Theological Union (for a history conference put on by the Chicago Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee history project) got me thinking about how Joiner fit into a grand historical story of the Black South. But in our conversation, Joiner brought common sense to her Uncommon Essayist peer.
Joiner’s hometown is a specific place: “A lot of people only know Little Rock. So they are like, ‘Oh, are you from there?’ And I’ll never say Little Rock. I am from Dumas.” If you look up Dumas online, you’ll find that the town of around 5,000 residents has a quaint main street and a proudly lauded high school football team. Joiner underscores Dumas’s agricultural products and its delta environment in her account of her hometown. She claims Pickens, a town next door that’s “white-ruled… the farmers who have the money are white and the people who work at the cotton gin are black” speaks to the power structure across her home region.
Yet, in Dumas, locals had each other’s backs: “I was raised around adults from my church—if they were going to do something, they did it. I grew up in, I’ll say, a rich town in terms of community. And I’ll never forget how the community experience felt.” One story of how two daycare teachers, Ms. Janice and Mrs. Smith, taught restless child Ariel to read because she refused naps, brings home the quality of humane attentiveness that defines Dumas’s structure of caring: “In a larger city, they don’t have time for that. If you don’t want to take a nap, they could have just put me in a crib and been like, ‘Okay, shut up or whatever.’ But, you know, she took an interest in me.”
Communal Dumas lacks many material comforts: “We don’t have a Walmart there. There’s a quick pathway to nothing, really. It’s a lot of working at Family Dollar.” For kids at Joiner’s public school, academics became the portal to a state university, or maybe even Ole Miss, and then maybe, down the line, a professional career. Ariel could list off her successful peers who made it as doctors and lawyers elsewhere. Joiner was part of a crew of excelling students in her grade. She shrugs off her achievements—awards in Spanish and Math and a GPA that would have qualified her for valedictorian if not for internal school politics.
I had wondered if Joiner’s drive to succeed had been motivated by her grandparents’ example. She had mentioned in her class that her grandfather, a carpenter, and grandmother, a local banker, had overcome Jim Crow’s ruling logic. But for Joiner, there wasn’t a direct connection between academic excellence and the legacy of her family: “I do want to lie to you and come up with this grandiose story, but, to be honest, I just liked school. And I did it because that’s what I did.”
Joiner’s grandparents came up in our interview when she humbly referred to her bold decision to join the navy: “I got into Duke [University], but I didn’t have the money. And my grandparents, they had some money, but I didn’t want them to have to take it out. I knew they would [but] I don’t want them and my mom to be taking out loans. So I was like, ‘All right, whatever.’ I’m just going to go to the military.” I wonder how many of her UChicago peers would have done the same.
Joiner insists that her time in the military wasn’t exactly a sacrifice. Indeed, Joiner certainly spent her time well. She worked as an aide in her ship’s sexual assault victim’s clinic. She is proud of her volunteer teaching and shifts at food drives during her deployments across 15 countries. Yet, she has challenges coming back to school as an older student: “It’s another thing that made me regret going to the military because if I had gone to college after high school, I probably would have already had a doctor’s degree, maybe even two master’s, an M.B.A. and a CPA [certification].”
Joiner isn’t at UChicago to move on up and leave her home behind: “I don’t want to be remembered as the richest lady that ever came out of Dumas, Arkansas.” Joiner underscored that she wanted to be “in service, for enterprise reaching the community.” She suggested using her math skills to become a forensic accountant. She envisions helping people locked in coercive contracts. Joiner mentioned getting into politics later in life, after “she had gotten her hands in the mud.” Joiner may discount her chances at government office. But, if I were Senator Tom Cotton, I’d be nervous if I saw Ariel Joiner on the ballot.
Ben Khadim DeMott is a 2025 alum of the College.
Editor’s note: Joiner reviewed this article before its publication.
