Civil rights advocates avoid calling Sessions ‘racist’
WASHINGTON — Opponents to GOP Sen. Jeff Sessions’ selection as attorney general are calling him extremist, anti-immigration and insensitive to civil rights.
But they’re refusing to call him racist.
Civil rights groups purposefully are staying away from levelling that loaded term at Sessions, who was rejected for a federal judgeship in the 1980s amid accusations that he had called a black attorney “boy” — which he denied — and the NAACP and ACLU “un-American.”
The logic behind this strategy, they say, is to get greater scrutiny paid to Sessions’ actions and his record, and reduce the chances that senators who consider Sessions a friend could use allegations of racism against him as a distraction.