Top officials treated black racial-identity activism as threatening while ignoring white supremacists

Evidence

In November 2017, in response to questioning from members of the House Judiciary Committee, Attorney General Jeff Sessions wouldn’t say whether he considers Black Lives Matter an extremist group. “I’m not able to comment on that,” he told Karen Bass, a black Democratic congresswoman from California. But, he added, “I’m aware that there are groups that do have an extraordinary commitment to their racial identity, and some have even transformed themselves into violent activists.”

Bass asked whether the Ku Klux Klan or neo-Nazis would be identified as “white identity extremists.” Sessions attempted to avoid answering. “I didn’t follow that question,” he responded. Eventually, after a pained few minutes, he admitted the FBI hadn’t produced a report on any white extremist groups.

— Anna Merlan, Republic of Lies, 207

Categorization

• XREF: Directly supports vault claims about state racialized threat construction and studied ignorance of white violence. — connects to: White supremacist terror was overlooked as a global threat because of perpetrators’ racial identity — Khaled A. Beydoun, The New Crusades_ Islamophobia and the…, 922; The fabricated Black terror threat contrasted with real white violence against civil rights workers — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now: The 1960s New York…, 544; Racial democracy rhetoric suppresses black political organizing by branding it as reverse racism (+3 more)
• CANDY: Sessions’ ‘I didn’t follow that question’ dodge is a vivid, tellable detail.

Broader Connections

• White supremacist terror was overlooked as a global threat because of perpetrators’ racial identity #corroborates (0.82) — Khaled A. Beydoun, The New Crusades_ Islamophobia and the…, 922
• The fabricated Black terror threat contrasted with real white violence against civil rights workers #corroborates (0.75) — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 544
• The US government manufactured Islamophobia as a disciplinary technique against black political activism #exemplifies (0.75)
• White authorities ignored violence against Black men in the Jim Crow South #corroborates (0.72) — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 993
• Political threat from subordinate groups gets mislabeled as individual prejudice #complicates (0.72) — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 3404
• Racial democracy rhetoric suppresses black political organizing by branding it as reverse racism #corroborates (0.70)