Enough Already! Holder Must Go

Maxed out.

Dear General Holder,

Get out of here.  Please.  Yesterday will do fine.  Your command at Justice became intolerable in your first big public statement, four and a half years ago, the one in which you laid out your hateful view of American society:

…in things racial we have always been and continue to be, in too many ways, essentially a nation of cowards. Though race related issues continue to occupy a significant portion of our political discussion, and though there remain many unresolved racial issues in this nation, we, average Americans, simply do not talk enough with each other about race.

You were telling us two things:  First, you intended to inflame political racial conflict in the United States.  Despite some boilerplate language about overcoming racism and becoming “one nation,” your speech demanded that we focus on our alleged obsession with racial differences.  You said, quite rightly, that it was intellectually misguided to talk about “black  history” as something separate from “American history,” but you didn’t mean it.  Indeed, you insisted that Black History Month be used to do just that — to treat black Americans separately from the others.  And although you conceded that America in the 1960s was superficially unrecognizable compared to America in 2009, the differences were often trivial and deceptive:

though the world in which we now live is fundamentally different than that which existed then, this nation has still not come to grips with its racial past nor has it been willing to contemplate, in a truly meaningful way, the diverse future it is fated to have. To our detriment, this is typical of the way in which this nation deals with issues of race…

outside the workplace the situation is even more bleak in that there is almost no significant interaction between us. On Saturdays and Sundays America in the year 2009 does not, in some ways, differ significantly from the country that existed some fifty years ago.

Second, as the last sentence above so clearly proves, you were either ignorant of, or had chosen to ignore, what had happened in America from the sixties to 2009.  We had largely moved beyond thinking of ourselves in black or white terms.  Indeed, our society had changed so much that the very concept of “race” was overtaken by events.  By 2010, ten percent of marriages were between people of different “races,” long term “mixed relationships” were twice as numerous, and fully 85 percent of those polled by Pew said they thought the increase (the rate had tripled in a decade) was either a good thing, or not particularly significant.  It wasn’t a big deal, it was what we knew we were, a society in which “race” was less and less important, as it should be.  Only a small fraction thought it was bad news.

Maybe it’s different at the pinnacle of American society, where you have long lived and worked.  But down here in the middle class, we spend our weekends with the same people we see during the work week.  And it’s not racially determined.  Surveys invariably show that we are the least racist society in the world, along with the other members of the Anglosphere and the Latin countries (something you might bear in mind the next time it occurs to you to incite venom against some “white Latino”).  The society you’re talking about is not American, it’s Asian, or North African, or Arab.  We’re the best in the world.  You should know that and say it proudly.

But that’s not what you’re about.  You insist that Americans outside the workplace are basically the same racists as half a century before.  You may actually believe it, and you certainly want to use it , so you say it.  I don’t want to guess why you say it, I just want it to stop.  It’ll be overwhelmed by reality in short order, in any event;  what are you going to do with the children of mixed marriages?  What “race” will define them in your view of mankind?  Are you going to use the Nazi definitions of mixed race?  Or will you tailor your rhetoric to your audience (whites mostly think that Obama is “mixed race,” while a majority of blacks think he’s one of them)?

Throughout your tenure, you’ve acted as if one of your primary tasks were the protection of blacks against criticism and particularly against legal action, regardless of the facts in the cases.  I found the whitewash of the New Black Panthers‘ actions at a polling place in Philly during the 2008 elections particularly egregious, as did several Justice Department officials in the Civil Rights Division.  I’d be inclined to overlook it — a single event, after all — save for two things.  First, the behavior of your underlings, and second, the Panthers just showed up again in Florida in a “race case.”

One of your cohorts at Justice seem to have dissembled about the whitewash. Assistant Attorney General Thomas Perez swore that there was no political element involved in Justice’s decision, but a federal district judge found otherwise:

political appointees within DOJ were conferring about the status and resolution of the New Black Panther Party case in the days preceding the DOJ’s dismissal of claims in that case, which would appear to contradict Assistant Attorney General Perez’s testimony that political leadership was not involved in that decision.

So your political cohorts were involved in the whitewash, and denied it in sworn testimony (and Thomas Perez, who provided the  false denial, is now up for secretary of Labor).  It’s not the only case that suggests active sympathy for the Panthers.

As we have recently learned, Justice quietly helped organize the Florida demonstrations that clearly caused local legal authorities to reverse their original judgment, and bring charges in the now (and improperly) racially defined Zimmerman case.  Those demonstrations included the New Black Panthers.

No one could possibly characterize your race-driven proclivities better than you did, when you said, “I am the black U.S. attorney…there’s a common cause that bonds the black U.S. attorney with the black criminal…”

This is not what we need from the nation’s top legal officer.  It may well be a candid expression of your deepest passions, but it’s wrong for the attorney general, or any legal official of the American government.  We need an indisputably even-handed, fair-minded and color-blind AG.  You’re not that man.  You’re pushing an agenda that most Americans don’t like, based on a racially driven view of American history and society that is false, demeaning to most of us, and a threat — whether deliberate or unanticipated — to our continued progress. We don’t need any more of this.

Enough already!  Please leave.