Holly MatkinWashington, DC – President-elect Joe Biden’s pick for Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice has a history of pushing to defund police and previously proclaimed that black people have “superior physical and mental abilities.”
Biden has nominated civil rights attorney Kristen Clarke, who is currently the president of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, to head up the powerful division, FOX News reported.
Clarke, a supporter of Black Lives Matter, has advocated for defunding law enforcement and reallocating funds to various social programs.
“When we talk about defunding, let’s get specific,” Clarke tweeted in June of 2020. “It’s time to defund and TERMINATE programs like the ‘1033 program’ which allows the Defense Dept to send military surplus (armored vehicles, rocket-launchers, bayonets) to local police departments.”
“Trump expanded this in 2017,” she noted.
“Let’s defund police when it comes to home wellness checks,” Clarke suggested. “Increase funding for social workers instead.”
“We need to invest more on mental health treatment, and less on cops,” she continued. “A 2005 study showed 56% of state prisoners % 45% of federal prisoners suffered from a mental illness. Time to defund the criminalization of mental illness.”
Clarke further pushed to “defund the mass employment of cops inside our nation’s schools,” and argued that having school resource officers “feeds the school to prison pipeline and disproportionately harms Black and brown students.”
Clarke has recently faced backlash over a letter she wrote to The Harvard Crimson while she was president of the Black Students Association back in 1994, FOX News reported.
In the letter, which was brought back into the limelight by “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” Clarke told students to “use the following theories and observations to assist you in your search for truth regarding the genetic differences between Blacks and whites,” FOX News reported.
“One: Dr Richard King reveals that the core of the human brain is the ‘locus coeruleus,’ which is a structure that is Black, because it contains large amounts of neuro-melanin, which is essential for its operation,” she wrote. “Two: Black infants sit, crawl and walk sooner than whites.”
“Three: Carol Barnes notes that human mental processes are controlled by melanin — that same chemical which gives Blacks their superior physical and mental abilities,” Clarke continued, according to FOX News.
She argued that “some scientists” had concluded “that most whites [sic] are unable to produce melanin because their pineal glands are often calcified or non-functioning.”
“Pineal calcification rates with Africans are five to 15 percent, Asians 15 to 25 percent and Europeans 60 to 80 percent,” Clarke added. “This is the chemical basis for the cultural differences between blacks and whites.”
Lastly, Clarke wrote that “melanin endows Blacks with greater mental, physical and spiritual abilities,” FOX News reported.
Shortly after sharing her views on race science, Clarke invited anti-Semite author and then-Wellesley College professor Tony Martin to come speak on campus about his book, “The Jewish Onslaught,” according to FOX News.
“Professor Martin is an intelligent, well-versed Black intellectual who bases his information on indisputable fact,” Clarke told The Crimson at the time, according to FOX News.
She dropped her endorsement of Martin after her nomination last week, according to The Times of Israel.
“Giving someone like him a platform, it’s not something I would do again,” Clarke said on Jan. 14.
Rabbi Jill Jacobs, director of the rabbinical human rights group, T’ruah, said that Clarke is a “model” of repentance who should not be criticized for her past mistakes, The Times of Israel reported.
“It’s not accidental that people on the right are specifically going after women of color and trying to dig up anything from their past even if it’s something that happened when they’re 19,” Jacobs reasoned.
