DOJ official: "The law was written to protect black people."

Civil Rights Commissioner Gail Heriot deserves a round of applause.  Of all the many interesting things in the report on the New Black Panther dismissal by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, none was as revealing as the revelation that Deputy Assistant Attorney General Julie Fernandes made it clear to a large public audience that the voting rights laws weren’t meant to protect white voters from discrimination.  “The law was written to protect black people,” she told them.  Commissioner Heriot digs this disgraceful Fernandes quote up.   She made it before she was the Deputy Assistant Attorney General in front of an audience of fellow travelers who certainly agreed with her.  Of course Fernandes is literally correct in the most minimalist and irrelevant sense.  But the law that was written in fact protected more than black people.  It protects whites, Hispanics and everyone else.  This helps explain why the DOJ has kept Fernandes under wraps and out of the public eye since Coates and I testified about her racialist attitude.  These are the sorts of explicit outrageous statements that should disqualify someone from employment in the Civil Rights Division instead a enjoying a full wagon circle by the DOJ.  Had a similar racialist statement been made by a conservative-leaning lawyer inside DOJ, I’ll wager it would be front page news at the Washington Post with rent-a-crowd protests outside the office until the offending speaker resigned.

For the last year, many have brushed off the notion that sentiment exists that white voters shouldn’t be protected under the Voting Rights Act.  Commissioner Michael Yaki’s dissent borders on accusing some of a paranoid belief in anti-white conspiracies.  Commissioner Heriot does America a great service by cataloging many of these explicit views in the report from a time when it wasn’t so important to keep them a secret.  If you read nothing else in the Commission report, read pages 129-135.   It documents the well established view among many that the laws don’t protect all Americans.  I wrote at PJM about American University professor (and DOJ consultant) Alan Lichtman holding such views.  Another racialist academic is University of Virginia Professor Matthew Holden whose vile comments are documented by Heriot.   Pages 129-135 are a must read for Americans who want to see the dark evil racialist segment of the civil rights movement and academia that wants laws to protect some Americans, but not all.