‘Mr. Holder’s people’ — has no one else suffered?

Eric Holder, Barack Obama’s attorney general, apparently thinks that only “his people” have ever been victims of voter intimidation — and many other things.   

At a recent congressional hearing, Holder brushed off questions about his department’s failure to pursue voter intimidation allegations against two Black Panthers members who hulked around in front of a polling place in Philadelphia, apparently displaying at least one club, as if daring any White person to try to come in and vote. One of his deputy attorneys general resigned from his job in protest against the Justice Department’s inaction in the case. That former DOJ official said in earlier congressional testimony at a separate hearing that many of the lawyers in the department said it wasn’t their job to investigate voter intimidation practiced against White people — only minorities.

Rep. John Culberson, a Republican from Texas, questioned Holder about the case, according to a news report in Politico, a Washington, D.C.-based news website. But Holder appeared to take the questions as affronts, according to the article.

“Think about that,” Holder said. “When you compare what people endured in the South in the 60s to try to get the right to vote for African Americans, and to compare what people were subjected to there to what happened in Philadelphia—which was inappropriate, certainly that…to describe it in those terms I think does a great disservice to people who put their lives on the line, who risked all, for my people,” said Holder, who is black, according to Politico.

Gee, Attorney General Holder, we thought “the American people” were “your people.” Excuse our mistake; apparently it’s only African Americans like yourself. Can you imagine what outrage, what an uproar, would have erupted if a White attorney general had referred to Euorpean Americans as “my people”?

Yes, Mr. Holder, “your people” were not treated right in America, for the most part, for many years. They were bought and sold as slaves, which no sane person now defends. They were denied various rights. But keep in mind that Russian peasants, for example, were held as serfs for centuries — slaves in most everything but name, subject to the whims of wealthy noblemen who owned the estates on which they labored.  White people, black people, Asians, Arabs, Jews — some portions of all those groups have been slaves, at one time or another, throughout world history. And it was the abolitionist movement which began in Britain and, a little later, the U.S., that finally stamped out the slave trade, and slavery itself .

Keep in mind that many, many of the Africans who were sold as slaves, were sold by other Africans who had taken them prisoner in inter-tribal wars. And a large percentage of the time, the slave traders were Arabs — not Europeans. Neither of these facts makes slavery acceptable, obviously. But they give the lie to the notion that black slavery was all White people’s fault.

And keep this in mind, too, Mr. Holder: If one or more of your ancestors had not been abducted from Africa, and brought to the American colonies, or if later, the U.S., then you would have been born in Africa. I’ll just let that statement stand, by itself; think about it at your leisure, Mr. Attorney General.

We fought a Civil War in this country to free “your people”, Mr. Holder. More than 600,000 men, mostly White, died in that war. We amended the constitution to make sure that your people had the right to vote. After Southern Whites spent many years trying to undo those rights, we passed Civil Rights bills in the 1960s to brace up those same rights. The Supreme Court ruled in your favor in Brown vs. Board of Education, in 1954, that segregated schools were unconstitutional. Overwhelmingly White American administrations and Congresses have engineered such things as affirmative action, busing for the purposes of racial balance in schools, race-norming of test results, and the like. These things were all done to help “your people,” Mr. Holder.

Does “voter intimidation” only happen to minorities, Mr. Holder? Or does it just not matter to you when it’s White people who are the victims? We thought President Obama was elected by a majority vote of all the people, and you’re his attorney general. Doesn’t that count for something in your book?

In case you happen to encounter this website, Mr. Holder, I urge you to post a reply to this column — give your side of the story. That’s why we have a “Comments” link on here. Or send me an e-mail directly. It’s corporalko@yahoo.com .

Hope to hear from you, Mr. Attorney General, one way or the other.