About police killing unarmed black men. Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday grilled Kristen Clarke about that. Clarke is President Biden’s nominee to head up the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department. She would be the first Black woman to do so in the division’s history.
What we saw was mostly performative outrage, writes Dahlia Lithwick. Sen. John Cornyn of Texas tried to smear her with a satirical piece she wrote at 19 for the Harvard Crimson, a lampoon of “The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life.” Cornyn seemed not to notice it was satire. Sen. Mike Lee of Utah implied she “pressured the Justice Department not to prosecute the New Black Panthers for voter intimidation in 2008. She’d left the department in 2006.
Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri implied Clarke held prejudice towards Orthodox Jews when she had, Litwick explains, launched “several lawsuits against violent and anti-Semitic white supremacists.” Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas based his attack on a Newsweek headline she didn’t write for an article about George Floyd in which “she expressly did not call for defunding the police willy-nilly, and in fact argued for a more complicated strategy …” But complexity does not make for a spicy Fox News crawler.
Lithwick eye-rolls at “the rank silliness” of suggesting Clarke is bent on burning down the U.S. “policing, justice, voting, and civil rights” systems:
After graduating from Harvard and Columbia Law School, she went to the Department of Justice, then joined the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, then served the Office of the New York State Attorney General as head of the Civil Rights Bureau. As president and executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, she has worked like a demon to protect voting rights, minority rights, religious and women’s rights, all in precisely the way a lawyer would: through bold lawsuits and advocacy. I’ve argued that targeting civil rights lawyers for strongly worded tweets and advocacy evinces a shocking double standard for women of color in public life. But when the white men who are targeting a Black female lawyer as lawless and reckless and dangerous still won’t accept the results of the last presidential election and take no responsibility for the property damage and loss of life their words have caused, it just feels like cynicism for its own sake. That cynicism is the point. That this conversation is happening as the country is again roiled to the breaking point over racist police violence is why this transcends cynicism to become simply gross.
Face it, it’s all kayfabe.
But to Charles M. Blow, it is rage-inducing how our “systems of law enforcement, criminal justice and communal consciousness have adjusted themselves to a banal barbarism” represented by police killings of unarmed Black people:
This has produced in me and many others an inextinguishable rage, a calcification of contempt. As for me, I no longer even attempt to manage or direct my rage. I simply sit with it, face it like an adversary staring across a campfire, waiting to see how I am moved to act, but not proscribing that action and definitely not allowing society’s idea of decorum to proscribe it.
A society that treats this much Black death at the hands of the state as collateral damage in a just war on crime has no decorum to project. That society is savage.
On top of that, police have up-armored themselves because of firearms proliferation, and cities have configured their budgets to rely on police fines, turning policing into a ” profit-generating enterprise.” Blow states the obvious: “It is all so perverse. And too often it is Black people, particularly Black men, who bear the brunt when all this pressure culminates in a killing.”
In fact, Kimberly A. Potter, the 26-year police veteran who shot Daunte Wright last weekend in Brooklyn Center, Minn. was training other officers that day. She was, presumably, teaching them how to perform a pretextural traffic stop (expired tag) that if nothing else might generate a fine for the city’s coffers. A 20-year-old Black man and father is dead, Potter is under arrest, the region is under curfew, and National Guard troops stand “with guns outside of the city’s police station, which has been the center of nightly clashes.”
No wonder Blow is left only with rage.