SOWELL: Payback through reverse discrimination

Among those who have been disappointed by President Barack Obama, none is likely to end up so painfully disappointed as those who saw his election as being, in itself and in its consequences, a movement toward a “post-racial society.”

Like so many other expectations that so many people projected onto this man who suddenly burst onto the political scene, the expectation of movement toward a post-racial society had no speck of hard evidence behind it—and all too many ignored indications of the very opposite, including his two decades of association with the egregious Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

Those people of good will who want to replace the racism of the past with a post-racial society have too often overlooked the fact that there are others who instead want to put racism under new management, to have reverse discrimination as racial payback for past injustices.

Attorney General Eric Holder became a key figure epitomizing the view that government’s role in racial matters was to be a racial partisan and an organ of racial payback. He has been too politically savvy to say that in so many words, but his actions have spoken far louder than any words.

The case that first gave the general public a glimpse of Holder’s views and values was one in which young black thugs outside a voting site in Philadelphia were televised intimidating white voters. When this episode was broadcast, it produced public outrage.

Although the Department of Justice’s prosecution of these thugs began in the last days of the Bush administration, and the defendants had offered no legal defense, the case was dropped by the Justice Department after Eric Holder took over. One lawyer prosecuting that case resigned in protest.

That lawyer—J. Christian Adams—has now written a book, titled “Injustice: Exposing the Racial Agenda of the Obama Justice Department.” It is a thought-provoking and shocking book in what it reveals about the inner workings of the department’s civil rights division.

Bad as the decision was to drop that particular case, which it had already won in court, this book makes painfully clear that this was just the proverbial tip of the iceberg.

Despite the efforts of some in the media and in politics to depict the voter intimidation in Philadelphia as just an isolated incident involving a few thugs at one voting place, Adams shows that these thugs were part of a nationwide organization doing similar things elsewhere.

Moreover, the civil rights division has turned the same blind eye to similar voter intimidation and corruption of the voting process by other people and other organizations in other cities and states—so long as those being victimized were white and the victimizers were black.

This is all spelled out in detail, naming names and places, not only among those in the country at large, but also among those officials of the department who turned its role of protecting the civil rights of all Americans into a policy of racial partisanship and payback.

The widespread, organized and systematic corruption of the voting process revealed by the author is on a scale that can swing not only local but national elections, including the 2012 elections. The Department of Justice under Holder has not only turned a blind eye to blatant evidence of voter fraud, it has suppressed U.S. attorneys in its own ranks who have tried to stop that fraud.

Even in counties where the number of votes cast exceeds the number of people legally entitled to vote, Holder’s Department sees no evil, hears no evil and speaks no evil—if the result is the election of black Democrats. It has become the mirror image of the old Jim Crow South.

This is an enormously eye-opening book which makes painfully clear that, where racial issues are concerned, the Department of Justice has become the Department of Payback. A post-racial society is the last thing that Holder and Obama are pursuing.•

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Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. Send comments on this column to ibjedit@ibj.com.