The attorney-general Eric Holder infamously refused to prosecute Black Panther intimidators at a polling place in 2008,  and became irritated when questioned about his leniency. Defending them, he called them “my people”.

“His people” – by which he means black people – must not, it seems, be held as responsible for breaking the rules as other people.

That a US attorney-general should favor discrimination under the law, and practice it, is outrageous.

There was too little outrage, apparently, over the Black Panther incident to make him reconsider. Now he wants black children to be treated differently from others when they break the rules or behave intolerably at school.

This is from National Review, by Roger Clegg:

The Education and Justice Departments of the Obama administration today issued extensive joint guidance to K–12 schools on student discipline and, in particular, on how the administration will determine if school-discipline policies are discriminatory on the basis of race or ethnicity. …

On the grounds of needing to make sure that punishment is not meted out unfairly, the DOJ is asking for punishment to be meted out unfairly.

Predictably, the administration promises to be extremely aggressive in using the “disparate impact” approach to its civil-rights enforcement — that is, in ensuring that school-discipline policies that have disproportionate results across races are severely scrutinized.

It’s a fair question whether the federal government in 2014 needs to be micromanaging schools to ensure there is no actual discrimination, but certainly it’s a bad thing that the administration is going to be insisting on racial proportionality. …

Which is to say, even if black students misbehave more than others, they should not be punished more than others.

The idea is absurd, preposterous, STUPID.

The fact of the matter is that not all racial and ethnic groups (not to mention boys versus girls) are equally likely to be discipline problems. There are a variety of reasons for this, but I will just note here what is probably the main one. There are huge differences among groups in out-of-wedlock birthrates — more than seven out of ten African Americans, six out of ten Native Americans, and five out of ten Hispanics, versus fewer than three out of ten non-Hispanic whites and two out of ten Asian Americans are born to unmarried women — and children growing up in homes without fathers are much more likely to get into all kinds of trouble, including at school.

If schools are pressured to “get their numbers” right in this area, they will either start disciplining students who shouldn’t be or, more likely, will not discipline some students who ought to be.

We anticipate that both those measures will be taken.

If unruly students are not disciplined, the kids who will lose out the most will be well-behaved students in classes with undisciplined classmates, and those well-behaved students are themselves likely to be poor black or Latino kids. Somehow the Left always forgets about them in its eagerness to show compassion. …

It is true that there are difficult issues in the school-discipline area … But it profits nothing to view these problems through a racial lens.

Now look and listen for outrage, for protest, for reminders that the worst form of racism is discrimination under the law. It may be a long vigil.