President-elect Joe Biden’s pick for a top Department of Justice civil rights position is under fire after racist and black supremacist claims she made in college surfaced this week.
Kirsten Clarke, an attorney who leads the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, was nominated by Biden last Wednesday to serve as the Assistant Attorney General to lead the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division. Clarke has previously worked as a trial lawyer for the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, and worked in the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund.
On Monday night, however, a report aired on Fox News revealed that Clarke had a history of peddling racist and black supremacist ideas.
While studying at Harvard University, Clarke – then the president of the Black Students Association – penned a letter in 1994 to the school’s undergraduate newspaper, The Harvard Crimson, urging it to adopt her views on genetic differences between blacks and whites.
In her letter, which was penned in response to the controversy surrounding The Bell Curve by Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein, Clarke claimed that blacks have “superior physical and mental abilities”, adding that the skin pigment melanin had endowed blacks with superior traits than whites and Asians.
"Please use the following theories and observations to assist you in your search for truth regarding the genetic differences between Blacks and whites," Clarke wrote.
"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.
"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.
"Four: Some scientists have revealed that most whites 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. This is the chemical basis for the cultural differences between blacks and whites.
"Five: Melanin endows Blacks with greater mental, physical and spiritual abilities -- something which cannot be measured based on Eurocentric standards."
Clarke also endorsed an anti-Semitic professor, Tony Martin, who was noted for his controversial book, The Jewish Onslaught: Dispatches from the Wellesley Battlefront.
A year after the book’s publication and a month after her letter to The Harvard Crimson, Clarke invited Martin to speak at Harvard.
In his address, ostensibly meant to address The Bell Curve controversy, Martin excoriated Jews and Judaism, trashing the Torah, the Talmud, and the writings of Maimonides as being racist texts.
"There was a Jewish monopoly over Blacks being cursed," Martin said during the 1994 address, claiming that Jews had been the first to develop racist theories.
According to a report by The Harvard Crimson, Clarke defended Martin’s claims, saying: "Professor Martin is an intelligent, wellversed Black intellectual who bases his information of indisputable fact.”
Clarke’s handling of the fiasco prompted The Harvard Crimson to criticize her for bringing “the ugly specter of anti-Semitism to a lectern on campus,” and lamenting the damage Clarke’s invitation to Martin caused to black-Jewish relations on campus.
“The damage has been done. Black students have already been barraged with misrepresentations of what the Jewish people and ethical tradition have to offer them.”
“We need to know, Kristen, if you stand with Tony Martin, or if you stand with us.”
