Kristen Clarke Protected Black America. Trump’s Replacement Will Hunt Us.

Trump’s new head of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division will allow the police, the landlords, and the tech sector to unleash antebellum against Black people.

Who is the most important attorney for Black people in America? Your answer to that question probably depends on your circumstances and why you need a lawyer in the first place. If I get shot by the white man’s cops, y’all better call Benjamin Crump for me. If they get me, I won’t really care about them going to jail, what with me being dead and all. But my last thought (other than “I should have moved to Jamaica when I had the chance”) will be concern for the future of my wife and kids. I wouldn’t want them to have to work another day in their lives. Ben extracts justice through the only means the white man respects: cash money.

If I’m alive and merely subjected to illegal discrimination, the lawyer I’m calling is Bakari Sellers. Like every good civil rights attorney who deserves that title, Sellers is part lawyer, part private investigator, part spokesman and part therapist. He believes you. You don’t have to convince him systemic racism exists; he knows it does and he’s there to help you prove it.

I tend to highlight the lawyers who are going to help me defend myself, but for people more concerned with actually holding white folks accountable for their crimes against us, you might name any of our strong Black state attorneys general, like Keith Ellison in Minnesota, or Letitia James in New York. Janai Nelson, the current leader of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, is “who you gonna call” when the white folks empowered by Donald Trump start dressing up as “ghosts.”

But these people (and countless other fearless Black legal minds out there) are merely running for second place. For the last four years, the most important attorney for Black America has been the assistant attorney general for civil rights: Kristen Clarke. She had more raw legal power than any other Black attorney in America, and unlike her feckless boss at the Department of Justice, Attorney General Merrick Garland, she used it. Kristen Clarke should be a name known by every Black person in this country. She fought. And if our community does right by her, that woman should never have to pay for another meal or drink for the rest of her life.

Clarke laid down a legendary list of accomplishments at the DOJ, including the convictions of more than 180 police officers for civil rights abuses. Clarke, not Kentucky, went after the officers who killed Breonna Taylor, and Clarke got convictions of the three men who lynched Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia. She convicted over 125 people for hate crimes, including the mass shooter who killed 10 Black people in a Buffalo grocery store (the case is still ongoing), and the mass shooter who killed 23 people in a Texas Walmart while spouting a Trump-inspired white supremacist manifesto. On her way out of the door, she finished and released a massive report on the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921. While that effort comes too late for justice to be given to the victims and their descendants, telling the story of what white people have done to us in this country is more important than ever as Trump and his forces try to whitewash the history of white violence and terrorism against us straight out of the historical record.

I will believe until my dying day that if Joe Biden had picked Clarke for the top job as attorney general instead of Garland, Trump would be in jail right now instead of the White House.

But my answer of Clarke is a bit of a dodge to the question I posed. Because the most important attorney for Black Americans is always either the attorney general or, if the AG is punk, the assistant attorney general for the Civil Rights Division of the DOJ. Always. It doesn’t matter if you grew up in a time where Thurgood Marshall — or Johnnie Cochrane — was the most famous Black attorney you knew. The AG or the person running the Civil Rights Division is always the most powerful attorney for our people.

That’s because only the people at the Department of Justice can bring the full force of the federal government down upon the head of whichever white man is pissed off that he has to plant his own crops today. Attorneys working outside of the government can make profound arguments and go to court and nicely ask the country to treat Black people better than chattel. But the DOJ can enforce the laws. Who they enforce the laws against (and who they let walk away scot-free despite stealing classified documents and hiding them in their bathroom) sets the tone for the entire country.

A private civil rights attorney may be able to bring one cop to justice. The DOJ can charge entire police departments and hold them accountable. The Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, the Americans With Disabilities Act, these laws mean nothing without people at the DOJ willing to enforce them and charge people for violations. The attorney general is always the most important cabinet appointment in a presidential administration (I actually think that the federal attorney general should be an elected position, elected independently from the president, just as state AGs are elected independently from the governors of each individual state). And yet, most people can’t name the AG (unless they’re a giant failure like Garland) and have no idea who’s running the Civil Rights Division.

Donald Trump has nominated former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi to be his attorney general, and Harmeet Dhillon to be the 20th assistant AG for civil rights (the division was only created in 1957). I’ve written about Bondi here (TLDR: She’s a pathetic Trump sycophant who will do great harm, but at least she’s not been accused of statutory rape). So let’s meet Dhillon, the next most important attorney for Black America.

Dhillon is a Fox News pundit who was a legal adviser to Trump’s 2020 campaign and unsuccessfully argued that the election was stolen. She became relevant in white wing circles during the COVID-19 pandemic, filing numerous lawsuits against mask and vaccine mandates. She, again unsuccessfully, tried to oust Ronna McDaniel (Mitt Romney’s niece) as chair of the Republican National Committee (Trump gave that job to his daughter-in-law, Lara Trump; I swear these people practice nepotism like it is a sacrament), and ended up defending Tucker Carlson in one of his lawsuits.

Her qualifications to lead the Civil Rights Division are … well, I couldn’t find any. She’s Indian. I’m pretty sure Trump would call heading the Civil Rights Division a “Black job” but a brown-ish person will suffice under the Republican version of DEI. She’s also written a lot about how conservatives are discriminated against, and since Trump’s entire idea of civil rights is that the poor, downtrodden white man cannot get a fair shake in the country they think they own, appointing a person who thinks the only person who has faced discrimination in this country is Will Cain makes sense.

It doesn’t actually matter that Dhillon is unqualified for her position because the Trump plan is to prevent the Civil Rights Division from taking any actions at all. I mean that literally. Trump has already ordered a “freeze” on the Civil Rights Division and their work: They’re not allowed to file new lawsuits, enforce orders already obtained or investigate any allegations of racial injustice. Dhillon has literally been appointed to do nothing, and you don’t need a lot of training or talent to sit on your ass all day collecting a government check.

Under Dhillon’s “leadership” the legal position most impactful to the Black community will literally do nothing and that means all of the corporations and institutions eager to do racism will be able to operate without fear of federal oversight. We can expect racial discrimination to ramp up, not just from Trump’s federal government or the state governments in confederacy with Trump, but from banks, realtors and, of course, the police. If you don’t think Biden and the Democrats did enough to stop police brutality, wait until you see what happens when Trump and the Republicans do nothing at all.

Speaking of Democrats, they will almost certainly fumble the ball when it comes to convincing Black voters that they’ll do better. Democrats will talk about Trump this and Trump that. But they won’t show people how Pam Bondi is hollowing out the Justice Department. They won’t mention Dhillon at all. They’ll talk in the clouds about defending the “rule of law” or some other institutional notion completely detached from people’s daily lives, but they won’t talk about how they’ll do better and who they’ll appoint to do it. Democrats planning to run for president in 2028 should be promising to reinstall Clarke and warning people that while Dhillon might let them get away with their racist shenanigans now, justice and retribution will be coming for them should the Democrats take back power.

Instead, they’ll talk about “healing” and “turning the page” and “coming together across the aisle,” and when they lose, they’ll again wonder why so many Black people stayed home, unable to distinguish between the openly white supremacist party and the totally different party that’s simply willing to work with the white supremacist one in the name of comity.

There is no greater distinction between how Republicans treat the civil and constitutional rights of Black people versus the Democrats, than who they choose to head the Civil Rights Division of the DOJ, and yet Democrats will go through entire election cycles without mentioning it. The person in this job is the operational center for the defense of our constitutional rights and the enforcement of our anti-discrimination laws, yet instead of making them superstars, Democrats pretend that they’re mere functionaries dispassionately applying legal jargon while the important people (like the Democrats running for election) make all the real decisions.

We should know who our friends are and be able to name our enemies. Kristen Clarke served us admirably and was in the trenches fighting for us. Dhillon will watch us suffer and will be on the television laughing at us. I hope people will remember that next time an election comes to town.