Attorney General Holder’s Deceptive Attack on Chief Justice Roberts

by Hans Bader on May 19, 2014

In a speech this weekend, Attorney General Eric Holder said that “the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to speak openly and candidly on the subject of race.” But ironically, he himself engages in deceptive rhetoric, caricaturing and distorting what others say about racial matters and related regulations. Far from speaking candidly about race, his speech falsely attributed words to Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts that Roberts never said.

In a “commencement speech at Morgan State University, a historically black college in Baltimore, on Saturday,” Holder claimed that “Chief Justice John Roberts has argued that the path to ending racial discrimination is to give less consideration to the issue of race altogether.” But Roberts never said any such thing, and Holder was dishonestly putting words in his mouth. As The Washington Post noted, this statement by Holder took “direct aim at the Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., who famously wrote in a 2007 opinion that ‘the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.’”

In short, Holder replaced Roberts’ actual admonition “to stop discriminating on the basis of race” with a quite different admonition to “give less consideration to the issue of race.” These are quite different things. Indeed, for an institution plagued by racism to “stop discriminating on the basis of race,” it may need to become vigilant about preventing such discrimination by racist employees, and focus more on racial problems and issues.....To Read More....