January 4, 2017
Posted by Jay Livingston
When
I was a child, I remember, I heard my parents say dismissively of
someone, probably a politician, “Yeah, some of his best friends are
Jewish.” I didn’t understand. How could my parents resent someone who
had Jewish friends and said so publicly? When I was a bit older, I
understood – anti-Semitism is not merely a matter of personal
friendships or public sentiments.
What reminded me of this
incident was today’s Washington Post story on the letter signed by over 1100 law professors opposing the nomination of Jeff Sessions to be Attorney General. The Post leans toward framing the
issue as one of personal bigotry. It excerpts this sentence from the
letter: “Nothing in Senator Sessions’s public life since 1986 has
convinced us that he is a different man than the 39-year-old attorney
who was deemed too racially insensitive to be a federal district court
judge.”
The opposing statement comes from William Smith, an
African American who has been Sessions’s chief counsel. “In the last 30
years, they probably haven’t spent 10 hours with him. I spent 10 years
working with him . . . as his top legal adviser. There are no
statements that he made that are inappropriate.”
Is Jeff Sessions
a racist? Is he, as the law profs say, “racially insensitive”? These questions are irrelevant,
barring a history of blatantly racist statements or membership in the
Klan. But also irrelevant is the question of whether some of his best
friends or advisors are Black.
That “1986” in the law
professors’ letter refers to a case Sessions, as US Attorney, brought against
three African American civil rights leaders who helped elderly Blacks –
some housebound, some illiterate – complete their ballots. The case was
so flimsy that the judge dismissed more than half the charges for lack
of evidence. On the charges that did go forward, the jury quickly found
the defendants not guilty.
Was Sessions’s racist? Well, if you
bring trumped-up charges against three Black people – charges that carry sentences
of 100 years – it’s a pretty good guess that you want to scare everyone, maybe especially other Black people,
from doing what those people were doing. In this case, what they were
doing was helping more Black people to vote. But Sessions’s motives need
not have been racist. I suspect they were more political. It wasn’t that the
voters being helped were Black; it’s that they were voting for Democrats.
In the
US, especially the South, there is such an overlap of race, lack of
education, poverty, and political party that laws and legal actions that will
suppress Democratic votes need not appear explicitly racist. The new
laws in North Carolina and elsewhere that make it harder for people to vote are race neutral in their language. But so were literacy
tests and the poll tax. (See my earlier post and
joke here.). In prosecuting the Black-vote workers, Sessions was merely invoking the law in its majestic equality.*
Does
Sessions have Black friends and advisors? Has he spoken nicely about
civil rights? Who cares? The more relevant questions are about the cases he brought
when he was a US Attorney. In what ways did these advance the cause of
civil rights and racial equality? In what ways did they stall that advance? (For more on this question see this op-ed from three DoJ civil rights lawyers.)
It’s like the question of whether
Steve Bannon – the man Trump has chosen as his chief strategist – is an anti-Semite. His defenders, of course, say no and point out that he has worked for Jews and hired Jews to work for him. But under his leadership, Breitbart became,
in his own words, “a platform for the alt-right,” a category that includes
people who really are blatantly anti-Semitic. But hey, some of his best
friends are Jewish.
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* “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids both the rich and the poor from sleeping under bridges” — Anatole France.
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