Government

When Sessions Talks About The Law's 'Anglo-American Heritage,' It Can Be Accurate And Racist At The Same Time

How you feel about the phrase "Anglo-American heritage" says a lot about how you view racism.

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(Photo by Zach Gibson/Getty Images)

Speaking to the National Sheriffs’ Association yesterday, Attorney General Jeff Sessions declared that “The office of sheriff is a critical part of the Anglo-American heritage of law enforcement.” The remark was, apparently, an ad lib since the prepared remarks described the sheriff as “a critical part of our legal heritage.” Critics of the Attorney General were quick to brand this departure as racist and call for his resignation. This triggered its own backlash when a brigade of lawyers and “I know a lawyer” types shouted down the criticism by pointing out that common law is uniquely Anglo-American because lawyers are horrible know-it-alls.

Over the next several hours, people dutifully lined up on one side or the other either declaring the remarks racist or defending them as accurate because we live in a world of insufferable hot takes and no one is willing to consider the reality that they can, in fact, be both racist and accurate.

Alyssa Milano voiced her disgust at these remarks and called for the AG’s removal, prompting wildly condescending response Tweets like this one.

I suppose because Alyssa Milano is a celebrity and a non-lawyer it’s relatively easy for pundits to write-off her remarks as an “emotional over-reaction to everything” (and I’d imagine her being a woman played a role in this specific response too) from someone who just doesn’t understand the law. But the NAACP has a pretty good grasp of what the law is and they shared Milano’s horror over the Sessions remarks.

”The latest racially-tinged comments by U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions should give all people reason to worry. His decision to link the term Sheriff to some part “of the Anglo-American heritage of law enforcement,” is an unfortunate yet consistent aspect of the language coming out of the Department of Justice under his tenure and in the opinion of the NAACP, qualifies as the latest example of dog whistle politics.

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To be clear, the role of sheriff grows out of the English legal system that America largely cribbed when setting up shop. From the Sheriff of Nottingham to Rosco P. Coltrane, sheriffs have a pretty consistent legacy in the cultural imagination. But there are two problems with the rickety defense people are offering for Sessions.

First, “truth” is not a defense to racism. At the core of the white disconnect with racism — especially the white lawyer’s disconnect with racism — is believing the “R-word” is fundamentally an insult against white people. This is why defenses of alleged racism consistently litigate themselves in both social and traditional media as if though they’re libel claims where proving “truth” fully absolves the speaker of guilt. Except racism isn’t an insult to white people, it’s a bundle of actions and structures that do violence to non-white people. Recharacterizing accusations of racism as quasi-defamation issues inappropriately recenters the subject of the discussion as the white person as we suss out whether racism is fair or unfair to the white speaker. Because, as always, white people are the snowflakes.

And unlike a lot of political issues, this isn’t doesn’t even rest on a liberal-conservative axis — white conservatives recoil at the accusation and white liberals revel in charges of racism as an “insult” to the speaker, just one that the speaker has earned. In either event, the story of racism is always about white people.

Jesus, it doesn’t always have to be about you — I’m kind of looking in your direction, Boston.

Secondly, lawyers shouldn’t have to be scolded about this, but wordsmithing matters. The person who wrote the prepared remarks didn’t put “Anglo” in there. Sessions could have talked about the job as a uniquely American institution, given that the “Anglo” half of his statement eliminated the sheriff as anything but a ceremonial job ages ago. The point is, the impulse to gratuitously modify “our” into not just “American” but “Anglo-American” is a dog whistle and nothing more. The Washington Post, clinging to objective journalism to a fault, points out that liberal lawyers have used “Anglo-American” to describe law before. Unfortunately for Sessions, these examples make his remarks even worse.

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Oh, the Obama administration said it when talking to Chinese lawyers? Yeah… because they were intentionally drawing nationalistic distinctions and saying “this is how our law works, which is not how your law works.” When you tell a room full of people elbow-deep in the prison-industrial complex of jailing black and brown people at ludicrously high rates that they’re part of the “Anglo-American heritage” that registers as drawing a distinction too. And it’s not a pretty one.

Someone right now is out there saying, “where’s the forgiveness for an honest mistake?” Maybe Sessions just reached a part of the speech where he saw the word “our” and decided to change that to “Anglo-American” for entirely innocent reasons. He just “filled it in” with ancient legal history because he thought his audience of sheriffs would appreciate a little Blackstone’s Commentaries as a diversion.

Maybe he did. He almost certainly didn’t. But by all means let’s waste our time litigating the “truth” of his intent while he avoids releasing a statement like, I don’t know, “I certainly didn’t intend to cast the role of sheriff along racial lines, but obviously that’s a fair interpretation so I want to take this opportunity to renounce in the strongest terms the idea that sheriffs are policing along racial or ethnic lines.” It’s a remarkably easy statement to make if he had any genuine interest in avoiding the subtext he invited.

But honest apologies for racism aren’t really part of our Anglo-American heritage.

HeadshotJoe Patrice is an editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news.

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