President-elect Joe Biden's pick for assistant attorney general of the Civil Rights Division came under fire on social media after Fox News host Tucker Carlson. Social media users labelled Kristen Clarke a "black supremacist" following Carlson's segment.
On Jan. 7, Biden announced Clarke as the nominee for assistant attorney general of the Civil Rights Division. While delivering a speech following the announcement, she talked about equal justice for Americans despite their race. She also vowed to "turn the page on hate and closed the door on discrimination by enforcing our federal civil rights laws" and said that leaders like Thurgood Marshall and Constance Baker Motley influenced her.
However, on Monday, Carlson spoke about Clarke's alleged racist and anti-Semitic views. The Fox News host spoke about the letter she wrote explaining her views on race science to The Harvard Crimson in 1994 when she served as the president of the Black Students Association at the Harvard University.
In the article, Clarke reportedly wrote that she the editors to use in their "search for truth" about genetic differences between races. Clarke claimed that "melanin endows blacks with greater mental, physical and spiritual abilities."
"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," she wrote, according to an excerpt of the letter shared by Carlson.
The same year, Clarke invited the late Wellesley College professor Tony Martin, who self-published the book The Jewish Onslaught: Dispatches from the Wellesley Battlefront. At the event, Martin reportedly said that the Jewish people had a "monopoly" on the notion of African inferiority. He also said that the "so-called sages" of the Babylonian Talmud were the first racists in history.
Following Carlson's segment, social media users criticized Clarke for her views. Some even called her "black supremacist."
"Person who openly discriminated and holds racist black supremacist views is Joe Biden's pick to run the DOJ's Civil Rights Dept," one Twitter user wrote.
However, other Twitter users came to Clarke's defense saying that she made the comments 26 years when she was only a college student.
