Dog whistling

Uncredited photo of Debo Adegbile, via the National Review.

John Fund is very concerned about President Obama's nominee to replace the "highly controversial radical" Thomas Perez as head of the DOJ's Civil Rights Division by

someone who clearly shares Perez’s worldview, Debo Adegbile, the senior counsel to the highly partisan Senate Judiciary Committee. He will also be the fourth head of the division who has worked at the Washington office of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund.... which has a rigid view of civil-rights enforcement...

Not only that, but

during Adegbile’s time at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the group became increasingly radical, going so far as to oppose criminal-background checks by employers and endorsing extreme racial-hiring quotas. It even provided legal representation to Mumia Abu-Jamal, a former Black Panther and Marxist revolutionary who was convicted of murdering a Philadelphia police officer. The question of Abu-Jamal’s guilt is not a close call....

The Civil Rights Division handles cases far afield of voting rights, enforcing federal statutes that prohibit all different kinds of discrimination. Its decisions under Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder have become increasingly bizarre and ideological.

So what are we saying? Adegbile shouldn't head the Civil Rights Division because his previous work history shows he's in favor of enforcing civil rights law? Because the LDF opposed criminal background checks (it didn't), endorses "extreme" racial quotas (it sticks like glue to the text of the 1964 civil rights law

 (“The 1964 Civil Rights Act says, unequivocally, you may not use race in a hiring decision” except as a remedy for past discrimination)

and defended Mumia (last I heard in American criminal courts everybody is entitled to the best legal defense they can get, even if National Review writers are absolutely sure they're guilty, and the issues over Mumia's death sentence, as opposed to his physical involvement in the crime, were of very great national significance; and Marxism isn't a capital crime, yet)? Or is there something else—can't quite put my finger on it—that I'm missing?

Of course, anyone who criticizes Adegbile during his Senate confirmation hearings will face charges of racism.

Oh wait wait, why is that? What on earth would be racist about criticizing Debo Adegbile? Nobody said anything about race here, did they, except for the implication that Mumia must have been black, since he belonged to the Black Panthers?

Well, it turns out Fund's just too delicate to mention it, but Adegbile himself is black, sort of like Obama himself, with a white mother and a father from West rather than East Africa. And the NAACP is black in origin, and the civil rights it defends are those of blackety-black people, and the possibly criminal job candidates they're worried about are all black too, and Fund is lining up all these blackety-black-black horrors for his readers because every possible objection to Adegbile has something to do with blackness, controversial, radical, extreme, and Marxist blackness of course. So sorry, but yeah, if that's all you've got, I expect you will get accused of racism. Life's funny that way.

Kazimir Malevich, Black Circle, 1920s. Via Olga's Gallery.