Opinion: Republicans launch yet another racist smear campaign against a female nominee
Opinion by
Jennifer Rubin
March 17, 2021
Kristen Clarke, President Biden’s nominee to head the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, finds herself in the middle of a tiresome rerun of an all-too-familiar Republican smear campaign against women of color. It goes like this: Once a nominee is announced, Republicans search for some statement from her to twist and blow up out of proportion. They then throw around terms such as “radical” or “racist” to slander her. (This routine comes from a party that is committed to anti-voting legislation and that does not blink when Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) says white supremacist rioters did not scare him because they are patriots, but Black Lives Matter demonstrators do.)
For Clarke, the right-wing outrage machine had to go back to her college days. When she was a 19-year-old sophomore at Harvard University in 1994, “The Bell Curve” was published and sparked a furious debate over race and IQ. Black students at Harvard, feeling besieged and smeared, organized rallies, wrote letters and held talks to debunk a race-based theory of intelligence. Tony Martin, a Black Wellesley College professor, offered to come speak at Harvard. Clarke, not aware he had recently written an anti-Semitic book, accepted the invitation as president of the Black Students Association.
When a furor erupted over his appearance, she and another student, Victoria Kennedy, wrote a letter to the Harvard Crimson attempting, in Jonathan Swift fashion, to mock race-based claims to superiority. After listing some obviously baseless theories that Black people are superior to Whites, she explained, “We can readily admit that an abused child is less likely to achieve academically than a child that has grown up in a supportive atmosphere.” She added, “Black children, whether rich or poor, grow up with an added abuse which white children never have to face. Imagine the message that misguided information like The Bell Curve would send to a Black child who is trying to find her place in school. It’s degrading, belittling and outrageously false.”
Right-wing groups pillorying Clarke now take the parody in her 1994 letter as a true expression of her views and fail to cite the complete Crimson letter, which goes on to distinguish the parody from the authors’ actual views. The Crimson made this clear in its reporting on the controversy in 1994: “Their own views on the book, Clarke and Kennedy said, are contained in the letter’s last few paragraphs. ‘It seems that whites have grown tired of hearing about racism,’ [Clarke and Kennedy] write. ‘So some have turned to measures such as The Bell Curve to [relieve] themselves of blame.’"
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/03/17/republicans-racist-smear-campaign-focuses-kristen-clarke/
