The Washington Post reports that Verizon Communications security chief Mike Mason is the front-runner for succeeding FBI Director Robert Mueller as head of the FBI. Mason, a former Marine and field agent who rose to a top leadership position in the FBI, has a pretty remarkable paper resume. He'd also be the first black director of an agency that, under J. Edgar Hoover, devoted much of its resources to undermining black leadership it saw as "subversive."
Mason, while stressing that he never felt discriminated against in the FBI, also sided with a group of black agents who sued the agency for discrimination in 1991. The Post profiled him in 2006 as part of their "Being a Black Man" series:
At one point, however, Special Agent Julian Stackhaus, one of the plaintiffs, butted heads with Mason after he said Mason accused him of trying to divide the black and white agents.
That angered Stackhaus, but Supervisory Special Agent Emanuel Johnson, the lawsuit's lead plaintiff, assured his colleague that he had worked with Mason and he was "a good guy." While some of the black supervisors had tried to distance themselves from the lawsuit, Johnson said Mason was different. He attended some meetings of the group. At one, Johnson recalled, Mason said that while he had not been discriminated against, he understood the need for their efforts to level the playing field for all agents.
In 2001 a federal judge approved a settlement with the black agents.
Later in his career, Mason opposed tactics he thought were racially insensitive. He was investigating allegations of fraud against D.C. officials working in the U.S. Virgin Islands. The FBI wanted to photograph and fingerprint all the mostly black D.C. employees who traveled to the Virgin Islands to learn whose prints were on a bill.
Mason objected but was overruled. "If it had been the staff of a senator on the Hill, there's no way in hell we would have done all those fingerprints."
After Sept. 11, he grew alarmed by the number of reports about "suspicious" people taking photographs or standing outside government buildings or buying bullets in a gun store. They all had dark skin.
"I told my agents, we need to be careful," he said. "We need to make sure our activities are driven by logic and evidence, not just by fear. We need to make sure that we don't treat everybody as a suspect based on what they look like.
This all sounds promising, but if Eric Holder and Samuel Alito have taught us anything, it's that there's really a limit to how much a rhetorical acknowledgment of or even personal experience with discrimination affects one's respect for civil liberties, particularly when you're on the enforcement side of the equation. Holder gave a compelling speech to the Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee last year about his own experience being pulled over for driving while black, but he's nevertheless maintained the Bush-era FBI investigative guidelines that civil-liberties groups say allow for racial profiling. Whatever the historic significance of someone like Mason taking the reins at the FBI would be, that's not likely to change.
Given the fact that a number of conservative media organizations have just taken as a given that the president hates white people and has been using his authority as president to oppress them, a conservatives freak-out over yet another black man being placed in a position of authority, let alone over the FBI, doesn't seem too far-fetched. But come on, being on the investigative team that went after former D.C. Mayor Marion Barry has to count for something, right?
