If being race-neutral is important to being fair, it is impossible for Attorney General Eric Holder to be fair in the Michael Brown case. Holder is a man who sees everything through the prism of race and the “white man” is always the oppressor.
In a Wednesday op-ed in the “St. Louis Post Dispatch,” Holder made a pledge to the people of Ferguson:
This is my pledge to the people of Ferguson: Our investigation into this matter will be full, it will be fair, and it will be independent.
On Thursday Holder travels to that embattled Missouri town to lead the federal investigation of the case. The question that should be asked, however, is whether the AG has the ability to conduct a fair investigation into the shooting of the black teen. Based on the way he has run the Justice Department, if fair means treating both sides of the case equally and without prejudice, Holder will fail.
Remember the New Black Panther case? Holder’s Justice Department dropped the already won case of voter intimidation because of the belief that it was impossible for blacks to violate someone’s civil rights.
In September 2010 Christopher Coates, former chief of the Justice Department’s Voting Section and still a DOJ employee, defied his boss’s orders and testified before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights to discuss the reasons why the case against New Black Panther (NBP) was dropped even though a judge had ruled that the DOJ already won the case.
Coates’s testimony was a shocking indictment of the rampant racism against whites in the Obama administration’s Department of Justice. He accused the administration of using race to determine which cases are prosecuted. Corroborating the testimony of J. Christian Adams who quit the DOJ because the case was dropped, Coates illustrated that the issue goes way beyond that specific case. The real issue is that the federal agency charged with protecting civil rights is now a tool for increasing discrimination in the country, but this time against whites. The election of President Obama brought to positions of influence and power within the civil rights division many of the very people who had demonstrated hostility to the concept of equal enforcement of the Voting Rights Act.
When Holder was asked about the NBP case in front of Congress he 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 … I think does a great disservice to people who put their lives on the line for my people.
Interestingly Holder never denied that the NBP broke the law and forgets that as Attorney General all American people are “his people.”
Does the man who runs this department sound like someone who can conduct a fair investigation of a white police officer shooting a black teenager?
We are talking about an Attorney General who calls laws passed by states to enforce U.S. immigration law racist. He accuses states trying to protect “one man, one vote” for all its citizens with voter ID laws racist. Let’s face it: This is a guy who sees a racist under every bed.
Recently, he talked about the criticism of President Obama and himself as racist:
There’s a certain level of vehemence, it seems to me, that’s directed at me [and] directed at the president. You know, people talking about taking their country back. There’s a certain racial component to this for some people. I don’t think this is the thing that is a main driver, but for some there’s a racial animus.
Based on his tenure as Attorney General of the United States Eric Holder can be counted on to be skewed against Darren Wilson, the officer who shot Michael Brown, in way that is neither fair nor just.
There is no contention here that Wilson is innocent; the general public is not privy to enough evidence to make that decision. The point is that history demonstrates that Holder will begin his investigation from the presumption of Wilson’s guilt, which in turn drive his information gathering.
If fairness and justice is the goal, Eric Holder should not be allowed within ten miles of this case.
Cross-posted at The Lid
