Bashing the Republicans and the right-wing (even the center-right) for their blindness to privilege and racial injustice is low-hanging fruit for me, but every now and again there’s more good data to share on the matter. For example, a recent Government Accountability Office (GAO) report shows that during the Bush years, everything we’ve said about civil rights is absolutely true. The Bush Administration went out of its way to dilute the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, and placed political appointees in places where they could obstruct the actions of career lawyers and officials who would want to take on civil rights abuses that were reported to their office.

George W. Bush was never particularly taken with the civil-rights crowd. Not that he was exactly hostile to the notion of protecting society’s most vulnerable groups. But he and his minions assumed that the time for coddling minorities had passed. So after sizing up the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice—the most powerful advocate for civil rights within the federal government—Bush’s operatives endeavored “to rip the heart out of [it],” in the words of Ben Jealous, president of the NAACP.

In dry statistics and even drier prose, a report released last week by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) spells out how sweeping that effort became. The Voting Section of the Civil Rights Division veered away from challenging “at-large election systems” that marginalized African-Americans and focused on language discrimination against Spanish speakers. The Employment Litigation Section moved away from so-called pattern or practice cases (suits that took on widespread or systematic discrimination) in favor of individual complaints. (“Plenty of individual lawyers can bring these individual discrimination cases,” pointed out Alan Jenkins, executive director of The Opportunity Agenda, a New York–based nonprofit; but only the Justice Department can pursue certain big cases that can make a real difference.) Bush’s Justice Department was also particularly sensitive to discrimination against white males. In 2007 the division filed a suit against Indianapolis for favoring African-Americans and females over white males for promotion to police sergeant.

For Wade Henderson, president of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights (LCCR), the breadth of the changes crystallized during a meeting with Ralph Boyd Jr., an assistant attorney general for civil rights under Bush. A case filed by several women against the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority (SEPTA) was then working its way through the courts. SEPTA had instituted new physical-fitness standards for aspiring transit police. Many women had a hard time meeting the new standards, which required all new applicants to run 1.5 miles in 12 minutes or less. After being rejected by SEPTA for failure to pass muster, the women sued. The Justice Department signed on to that suit under President Clinton. Under Bush, it withdrew. Henderson tried to convince Boyd of the necessity of taking a stand against what he considered a clear case of discrimination against women. Boyd, as he recalls, responded with a lecture on how the women should exercise and get in better shape. He reduced “this case of discrimination to one of personal failings,” observed Henderson.

What really entertains me here is that not only was the Civil Rights Division hostile to minorities, they were also hostile to women. And not only were they hostile to minorities and women, they are particularly sensitive to the group that benefits the most from privilege and the old boy’s network, but seems to always feel threatened when confronted with their own prejudices and privilege. It’s absolutely stunning how scared even some so-called libertarian and centrist white males will get when they have to come to terms with their own privilege, and most of those same men will then deny that privilege exists and sputter into the tailspin of claiming that, like Bush and his minions did, the time for “coddling” minorities and women has passed and that all of this racism doesn’t really exist and is a figment of the imaginations of minorities. It’s a pretty quick jump for those particular white males, but it’s always an amusing one to watch them take.

Beyond this though, the GAO report is pretty damning, and while I’m sure things are getting better at the Justice Department and a breath of fresh air is headed through the department, it’s important to remember that it’s things like this that are relieved by having someone like President Obama in office. So while we may disagree with him or wish he were pressing harder on progressive issues, it’s important we don’t lose sight of the so-called smaller issues and positions that the Administration takes that keep our agencies of social justice in line with American values.

[ The GOP’s Civil-Rights Problem ]
Source: Newsweek