As bad as the Fast and Furious debacle is, there is another part of the Eric Holder story that deserves equal attention.

Namely –

Attorney General Eric Holder is a racialist. In fact, he is a professional racialist.

Note that I am not calling Holder a racist. That’s different. A racist is a person who believes there are significant differences in abilities or character among people of different races, attributes those differences directly to race, and almost always believes that his own race is somehow superior to other races. That’s not Holder.

A racialist, on the other hand, as the term is used here, believes that racism is itself the primary driving force of events, behaviors, and outcomes in all societies. Anywhere there is a perceived injustice or inequality of outcomes, a racialist looks first to racism as the underlying cause. To an avid racialist, any other contributing factor is either subordinate or is itself tied to racism in some other form at some other time or place.*

Eric Holder is well known for his claim that we’re a “nation of cowards” when it comes to race, for his documented race-biased pursuit of justice in the DOJ, and for his recent sniveling whimper that Congressional calls for his resignation over Fast and Furious are race-based. Through these behaviors, and because of his position as US Attorney General, Holder is a quintessential professional racialist.

As expressed by AR Ward and others, professional racialists variously use race as the basis for earning a living, making speeches, writing articles, winning elections, and determining policy. Their worldview is grounded in the notion that racism, specifically white racism, explains virtually all of society’s political and economic ills. Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton are perhaps the most visible, but other prominent professional racialists are Cornel West, Alan Johnson, Michael Eric Dyson, and Tim Wise.

Racialists, professional or not, use “racism” as their ever-ready trump card, instantly putting their target on the defensive. It works. The epithet racist is nasty and cutting, with an ugly sound that calls to mind Ku Kluxers, black-and-white images of 1950′s police with barking dogs, water cannons, and state governors (all Democrats, by the way) blocking the entrance of African Americans to public schools.

Old-fashioned virulent racism is all but gone now, and good riddance. But the Left is fairly teeming with racialists and racialism. Some professionals, like Jackson and Sharpton, owe their livelihood — indeed their whole raison d’être — to sniffing out and spotting perceived racism as if they were some sort of cultural pointer dogs. In fact, with old-time virulent racism so rare, these professional racialists have had to purposefully extend the definition of racism to include race-blindness.

As AR Ward puts it:

Of course we should all be anti-racist, but [racialists] don’t share the same definition of being anti-racist as most Americans. [To them], everyone in our society is either privileged (whites) or oppressed (“people of color”) because of racism. Since they think the driving force of privilege and oppression is race, naturally their enemies are those who are blind to race (almost always whites). So, according to the racialists, to be blind to race means being blind to racism.

To most people, race-blindness aligns well with the morally worthy I-Have-A-Dream vision of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., who called for the day when people would be judged by the content of their character and not the color of their skin. Unfortunately for professional racialists, their influence, power, income, and self-righteous self-image can last only as long as Rev. King’s vision remains out of reach. It is in the racialist’s own self-interest, therefore, to perpetuate at least the perception of racism in America. And that’s what they do, viciously slandering any political movement that does not adhere to their racialistic worldview.

In particular, the Tea Party Movement (TPM) is anathema to racialism. The TPM holds that free markets, limited government, and fiscal responsibility constitute the path to greater well-being for all Americans. This TPM credo has nothing to do with race. To the TPM, this implicit race-blindness is a feature, not a flaw. But to racialists, any race-blind political movement must be, by definition, racist, and the TPM in particular drives some virulent racialists into apoplexy. See for example the 1-minute video at this link, wherein avid racialist Janeane Garofalo becomes delusional about the Tea Party Movement.

So then …

How should people of good faith deal with professional racialists like Sharpton, Jackson, and lesser racialists like Garofalo? Well, how about going on offense? When they cry “Racist!” without cause, cry “Racialist!” right back at them, but with good cause. As an epithet for these angry, bitter people, racialist is accurate, deserved, and puts them on the defensive, which is where they belong — for a change.

Now while racialists like Sharpton, Jackson, and Garofalo are certainly annoying and get a lot of media attention, they do only moderate damage. They are often the billboards of their own buffoonery. And their flailing rants against the Tea Party Movement arguably draw new members to the Conservative cause as well as (re)energizing current members.

Eric Holder, however, is another matter.

As US Attorney General, Holder runs our Department of Justice. That’s serious. The exposé Injustice, by J. Christian Adams, has received scant media attention amid the Fast and Furious investigations, but Adams’ serious, highly credible book shows that as a professional racialist, Holder has abused his AG position as an opportunity to correct past racial injustices by committing new ones.

As Adams writes (in the Injustice introduction section):

The DOJ’s dismissal of the New Black Panther voter intimidation case — a case I brought and ultimately resigned over — gave the public a glimpse of the racially discriminatory worldview that characterizes this influential government agency. But the publicity surrounding that case was unusual. Until now, no one has fully conveyed to the American public exactly how deep the rot goes in the Civil Rights Division, and the many disgraceful scandals that have unfolded behind its closed doors.
…
The end result when racial extremists dominate such a powerful division of federal law enforcement is, in a word, lawlessness.

Impervious to sanctions and penalties handed down by federal courts, the DOJ Civil Rights Division feels unconstrained by department regulations or even by federal law. We now face the Orwellian situation where government lawyers brazenly ignore and subvert the law they have sworn to uphold, and where a leading civil rights protection agency discriminates against some racial groups while it favors others. This is not only lawlessness, it is the most dangerous kind of lawlessness — for history shows that once a nation’s laws cease to apply to the law enforcers, individual liberty does not survive for very long.

The Fast and Furious debacle may well bring Holder down, but if it does not, perhaps he should explicitly rename the Department of Justice with the more accurate name Department of Revenge for Past Injustices, or DORFPI. The acronym could be conveniently pronounced “dorf-pie” or “dorf-pee”. Catchy, no? And fitting, either way.

AG Holder’s deliberate corruption of our DOJ is one of the prime reasons that the Obama regime must be voted out in 2012.

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Afterword:

By the definition and discussion of racialism in this blog, am I somehow claiming that the last vestiges of racial, religious, and ethnic prejudices in America are gone? Of course not. But so what?

The best counsel I know of for victims of prejudice appeared in a decades-old newspaper column written by Thomas Sowell. (I’m relying on memory here since I can’t seem to find the actual column via Google). Sowell, himself black, wrote that the best advice he had ever received about prejudice was given to him when he was still a boy. It came from an old Jewish woman who told him “Don’t wait for them to love you.”

Sowell followed that advice rather well. He is, of course, a world-class economist, now at Stanford, and he is a superb conservative writer. I’m now enjoying his latest book, The Thomas Sowell Reader.

As more and more people follow the advice of that nameless old Jewish woman, professional racialists like Sharpton, Jackson, and Holder will be put out of business, and they’ll have to find another way to make a living. Bummer.

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* Some authors have used the term liberal racism instead of racialism to mean virtually the same thing. A superb writer, and incidentally a high school classmate of mine, Jim Sleeper, wrote a book with the title Liberal Racism in 1997. It stands as a benchmark on the subject, written by a decidedly Left-leaning person, which gives it all the more credibility since it is sharply critical of the mainstream Left for “getting race wrong”.