I don’t know about you, but I have a grandma who became an adult long before the Civil Rights Era.
My grandma, like all of my grandparents, is white, and she’s spent her entire life in two majority-white place—rural Indiana and rural Arizona. I’ve known her to make a comment or two about Muslims being hateful or certain neighborhoods making her uncomfortable. She’s also been known to punch me (playfully) when I beat her at Rummikub and to bake a mean zucchini bread.
These things are not irreconcilable.
Thomas Jefferson, the namesake of Senator Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III,* was a brilliant statesman, a freedom fighter, and—even by the standards of his time—a racist.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who helped save the world from Nazism and the United States from economic collapse, also interned Japanese-Americans and snubbed Jesse Owens after his history-making victory at the Berlin Olympics.
Admitting that a person is prejudiced in certain aspects of their life is not the same thing as admitting there is nothing praiseworthy about a person.
Which is good, because the science suggests that we’re all a little bit prejudiced.
As Ta-Nehisi Coates once wrote:
In modern America we believe racism to be the property of the uniquely villainous and morally deformed, the ideology of trolls, gorgons and orcs. We believe this even when we are actually being racist.
And this is what makes racism so hard to combat, especially today. If racism is a thing that racists do, and if racists are uniformly bad people, then it’s hard to look around us and see its effects in our everyday lives. It’s hard to see the racists in our everyday lives.
Many Republicans understood that Jeff Sessions was racist 30 years ago
In 1986, Jeff Sessions was rejected by Republicans in the Senate for a federal judgeship.
His nomination never made it out of the Judiciary Committee because two Republican senators, Charles Mathias (MD) and Arlen Specter (PA)—along with Sessions’s initially supportive home-state senator, Democrat Howell Heflin (AL)—voted against him.
President Reagan frequently pushed the limits of acceptable in his judicial nominees, but when the Senate rejected Sessions, it made him only the second federal judiciary nominee in 48 years to be voted down. It would be twelve years before another nominee to the federal judiciary faced the same fate.
Jeff Sessions was surrounded by a lot of racial allegations, and it’s hard to pinpoint exactly what convinced the senators to vote against him. Colleagues at the Department of Justice, where he was a federal prosecutor at the time, accused Sessions of making positive comments about the KKK (which Sessions brushed aside as “a joke”) and calling a white civil rights attorney a “disgrace to his race.” One of Sessions’s black colleagues testified that Sessions called him “boy” and told him to "be careful what [he said] to white folks.” And a different colleague testified that Sessions called the ACLU and the NAACP “un-American” because they “were trying to force civil rights down the throats of people who were trying to put problems behind them,” something Sessions later admitted under oath—at least the “un-American” part.
But perhaps the biggest flashpoint in Sessions’s record was a case Sessions had just tried in his role as a federal prosecutor.
Using the Voting Rights Act, which was supposed to protect the rights of black voters, Sessions brought indictments against three legendary civil rights figures for voter fraud because of their work helping the elderly and illiterate to vote in Alabama’s Black Belt. Many in his office discouraged Sessions from pursuing the case, and half of the charges were thrown out before the trial even began. It took a mixed-race jury less than three hours to come back with the verdict: not guilty on all counts.
It doesn’t much matter in the end which straw broke the camel’s back. Jeff Sessions’s appointment as a federal judge was rejected, and the reason was that a majority of the Senate Judiciary Committee members believed he was too racist to serve.
So why don’t they think he’s racist now?
Fast-forward 30 years. Sessions has been nominated for Attorney-General—which means he would run the Department of Justice and lead all federal civil rights cases—and his confirmation seems like a fait accompli. Swing votes in the Senate like Jeff Flake (R-AZ), Susan Collins (R-ME), and Joe Manchin (D-WV), all of whom refused to endorse Trump during the presidential election, have already declared their support for Sessions.
What has changed?
Jeff Sessions was elected to the Senate in 1996, and he’s been there ever since. Flake, Collins, and Manchin have all worked with him over the years, and they’ve undoubtedly found him to be a very good person. Maybe he makes good jokes, or mixes a mean cocktail, or treats his interns with kindness. Maybe he has black friends.
And I’m sure, in that context, it can be difficult to square the Jeff Sessions they personally know with the Jeff Sessions who was accused of all those things in 1986.
It shouldn’t be. They are the same person.
But our common cultural understanding of racism makes that difficult for many to believe.
Sessions’s colleagues in the Senate don’t want to publicly label him a racist
Because Sessions is a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, his own colleagues will be the ones tasked with deciding whether to recommend his nomination to the full Senate.
The question that faces them is simple: Should Jeff Sessions be Attorney-General, given his consistent history of hostility to civil rights and minority communities?
But instead, the question they are hearing is: Are all of the good things you know about Jeff Sessions actually a lie?
These questions have become conflated in our discourse about race and racism in this country. But they aren’t the same question.
You can know a person, and love a person, and trust a person, but if that person has said that “good people don’t smoke marijuana,” you probably shouldn’t put that person in charge of federal drug enforcement.
If a person has said that defining pussy-grabbing as sexual assault is “a stretch,” you probably shouldn’t put that person in charge of enforcing Title IX protections against sexual assault in higher education.
If a person supports a constitutional amendment to ban marriage equality, you probably shouldn’t put that person in charge of defending Obergefell v. Hodges against the organizations dedicated to overturning it.
And, for the love of God, if that person has demonstrated in the past that they will use legal power to, say, punish black people for organizing to vote, you should not make that person the Attorney-General of the United States.
But because the senators in charge of Sessions’s confirmation this time around have bought into a common myth about racists—that they’re people different from the rest of us—Jeffrey Beauregard Sessions III will probably be the next Attorney-General of the United States.
And that should scare all of us.
But we also shouldn’t give up yet. Call your senators.
*Technically, Jeff Sessions is named for his grandfather, who was named for Jefferson Davis, who was in turn named for Thomas Jefferson.