While there are countless critics who contend President Obama has not done enough for Black people, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach took a different, preposterous approach.
The staunch anti-immigration advocate agreed with a caller on his radio show that said Obama would forgive African-Americans “accused of a crime, charged with a crime, is not going to be prosecuted, regardless of the crime,” based on his recent immigration action.
Kobach, unfortunately, did not dispute the caller, named “Stu.” In fact, he added to the outlandish notion.
“Well, it’s already happened more or less in the case of civil rights laws,” he said. “I guess it’s not a huge jump. I think it’s unlikely, but you know I’ve learned to say with this president, never say never.”
It was a stunning exchange that crystalized the divide and perception about crime and race in America. FBI and Justice Department statistics have indicated Blacks receive more prison time than whites for the same offense and that whites, by the raw numbers, commit more crimes than Blacks, whether it violent crime, crimes against each other, children, mates, etc.
Kobach also claimed that Holder “basically made it clear. . . that the civil rights laws were only to protect minority races, and he was not going to be enforcing them to the benefit of white people who were discriminated against on the basis of their race.”
Kobach chooses to ignore the Justice Department’s decisions to not file civil rights violations charges in three of the most significant crimes in recent years—the deaths of unarmed Black males Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner and Michael Brown at the hands of white men, including two police officers.
It is a head-shaking perspective, considering the fact that for hundreds of years whites have not been prosecuted for committing brutal crimes against Black people, such as the thousands who were lynched during the 19th and 20th century. In the minds of many, that legacy of lynching is America’s own version of the holocaust. But while Jews have spent decades hunting down every single living Nazi involved in the horrors of the concentration camps, white Americans who participated in lynchings have been allowed to walk freely mostly without fear of retribution.
Kobach is a prominent anti-immigration activist who led many state laws restricting immigration, including the Arizona law that was struck down in part by the Supreme Court. As Kansas’s secretary of state, he’s spearheaded laws making it harder to vote.
Also, this is not the first time Kobach made controversial statements about Obama. In November, he blamed “affirmative action culture” on Obama’s success, concluding that the president received jobs and accolades that Obama “was not winning” on his own. Kobach also argued that Obama’s efforts to benefit immigrants could put America on a path toward “ethnic cleansing” in the future.
