Josh Gerstein reports that Attorney General Eric Holder became angry with Rep. John Culberson of Texas during a House appropriations subcommittee hearing today, after Culberson read Republican poll watcher Bartle Bull's ridiculous testimony to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission stating that the New Black Panther Case was the most egregious example of voter intimidation he had ever seen, even in comparison to the Jim Crow South.
"Think about that," Holder said. "When you compare what people endured in the South in the 60s to try to get the right to vote for African Americans, to compare what people subjected to that with what happened in Philadelphia, which was inappropriate....to describe it in those terms I think does a great disservice to people who put their lives on the line for my people," said Holder, who is black.
Holder noted that his late sister-in-law, Vivian Malone Jones, helped integrate the University of Alabama.
"To compare that kind of courage, that kind of action, to say some Black Panther incident is of greater concern to us, historically, I think just flies in the face of history," Holder said with evident exasperation.
Given the level of conservative hyperbole in the NBPP case, this kind of confrontation -- between the realities of segregation and the imagined sense of racial persecution white conservatives have fomented under the Obama administration -- was inevitable. It's not surprising that anyone with family members who actually lived through the realities of segregation would be baffled, if not outraged, by Bull and Culberon's trivializing comparison.
But it's not like you have to be black, or even liberal, to recognize how offensive the comparison is. Abigail Thernstrom, a Republican appointee to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission who identified the investigation as an attempt by conservative commissioners to "topple the Obama administration," slammed Bull's comparison in a piece for National Review last year, calling it "breathtakingly ignorant."
The actions of two Black Panthers in one Philadelphia precinct in 2008 were not remotely equivalent to the effort to keep blacks from exercising their democratic rights throughout the South; the equation is breathtakingly ignorant. The Panthers are a tiny fringe group — a handful of racist nuts. The KKK was a serious criminal conspiracy that terrorized millions of black Americans, and only massive intervention by the federal government could stamp it out. No competent historian would possibly endorse McCarthy and Bull’s contention that the actions of two Panthers in one little corner of Philadelphia were more blatant than what went on in Mississippi in the 1960s. If this ludicrous and poisonous idea gains acceptance in conservative circles, it will do more damage to American race relations than anything the Panthers could possibly do.
Sadly, this exaggerated sense of white racial victimhood has already gained acceptance in conservative circles, particularly among conservative media figures like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh. Rep. Culberson is endorsing the idea that a voter-intimidation case full of exaggerations, assembled by conservative attorneys in the Justice Department in conjunction with Republican activists, and involving no actual intimidated voters, is comparable to the decades-long bloody suppression of the black vote in the American South.
The comparison essentially erases history. To argue that the worst instance of voter intimidation that ever happened in the segregated South is comparable to two mean looking guys standing outside of a polling place is to pretend that nothing that terrible ever happened. It's not surprising that anyone with any living memory of what it was actually like would take offense. What's disgusting is that the likely response to Holder's understandable reaction to Culberson trivializing apartheid on the right will merely be further certainty that Holder and Obama are racist.
One more thing -- Culberson told Holder that there was "overwhelming evidence that your Department of Justice refuses to protect the rights of anybody other than African Americans to vote." There is in fact, overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Recently we've been discussing DOMA and the considerable legal barriers necessary to prove discrimination under the law. Imagine how easy it would be to prove racial discrimination if courts adopted a legal standard bearing any resemblance to the evidence Culberson and other Republicans have used to conclude, based on a single flawed case and the hearsay of conservative partisans, that the Obama administration is racist against white people.
