Christopher Coates used to be the voting chief for the Civil Rights Division of the United States Department of Justice. On Friday, September 24, he gave testimony under oath before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights about the attitude of the Department of Justice toward civil rights violations against white Americans.
Most egregious was the videotaped voter intimidation by New Black Panther members in Philadelphia in the 2008 election. Coates said: "As important as the mandate in the Voting Rights Act is to protect minority voters, white voters also have an interest in being able to go to the polls without having race-haters such as Black Panther King Samir Shabazz whose public rhetoric includes such statements as ‘kill cracker babies’ standing at the entrance of the polling place with a billy club in his hand hurling racial slurs at voters."
Coates is not the first former employee of the Department of Justice to raise this issue. E. Christian Adams testified in July 2010 that the agency showed hostility to civil rights cases in which the alleged perpetrators were black and the victims were white. Coates said that civil rights attorneys were pressured by the NAACP as well as by individuals within the Department of Justice itself to dismiss the case. He further noted that when the Department of Justice pursued a voter intimidation case against a black official in Mississippi in 2005, that there was a similar backlash within the department and by the NAACP.
The case exposes the problems caused when government tries to especially protect a certain class of citizens. The supporters of those departments and bureaus tasked to protect those particular citizens almost inevitably are special-interest organizations like the NAACP. And it is not unusual for bureaucrats to leave government for a cushy job in one of those special-interest firms. The relationship, almost inevitably, becomes incestuous. This grows, over time, into an institutional bias which seems quite natural to those who inhabit the closed world of advocacy for these special classes of citizens.
To the rest of the world, not prosecuting New Black Panther members caught on tape threatening voters smells very bad, but those in the Civil Rights Division-NAACP axis cannot even grasp what the fuss is about.
