On Friday, President-elect Donald Trump announced that he is going to nominate Jeff Sessions as the 84th Attorney General of the United States. Sessions has been a Trump supporter for a long time, and this offer was to be expected. The potential Attorney General hasn’t had a lot of media attention recently, so many people might not be familiar who he is.
Jeff Sessions has a pretty long track record of being an unabashed white supremacist. Sessions allegedly called a white Civil Rights lawyer a “disgrace to his race”, referred to a Black assistant attorney as “boy,” said the only problem with the KKK is that they smoke marijuana, and much more. None of this is confirmed, but it was enough to make Sessions be deemed unfit to be a federal judge. It seems that Trump is adding yet another blatant racist to his transition team.
Thomas Figures, the Black assistant attorney that alleged that Sessions referred to him as “boy” was reportedly threatened by Sessions when Figures spoke out about something offensive. After eight years of a Black president, we now have a president-elect who has nominated someone who threatens Black people for speaking up. In the current political and racial climate, this could spell disaster for Black Lives Matter protesters and families seeking justice. The administration could be more inclined to crackdown on protesters and actively suppress lawsuits and investigations regarding police brutality against Black people.
Throughout the election cycle and since Donald Trump was elected president people have been saying that he won’t do that much to hurt minorities. However, his vice president is a supporter of shock conversion therapy, and he has now nominated someone who is anti-Civil Rights to be attorney general. If Trump isn’t going to be the one to hurt minorities, then it seems that he’s going to relegate that task to the rest of his administration.
It’s important to note that while many of these allegations are unconfirmed (which basically means Sessions didn’t admit to them) there is still a cultural and political impact of him becoming attorney general. People’s already wavering or completely dissolves faith in the justice system won’t suddenly disappear. This only encourages people to believe that the system is actively working against them.
Regardless of your political opinions, it should be quite plain to see how dangerous it is to have an alleged anti-Civil Rights and pro-KKK judge be nominated to be attorney general. Even if the accusation are proven to be false tomorrow, he was still nominated when everything seems to be pointing towards him being a white supremacist.
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