Posted 14 February 2018 - 01:30 AM
I don't think it is either. Jeff Sessions has built a decades-long political career on wink-wink nudge-nudge white power dog-whistling. He's on a grander stage now, with more scrutiny, but sometimes the good ol' boy stuff slips through.
I think it's less bizarre to acknowledge that a true believer white supremacist who's casually racist in private and dog-whistle racist in public might occasionally fudge the Racism Algebra [(receptive crowd + law enforcement + entrenched racism - national stage)/cameras2], than to make the argument that this is the 1 out of 100 occasion where his fundamentally white supremacist world view didn't inform his invocation of the Anglo origins of certain policing power structures.
For the former, you'd have to acknowledge the truth of who Jeff Sessions has proven himself to be time and again and ignore nothing that I can think of. For the latter, you'd have to acknowledge the technical correctness of the citation and ignore Jeff Sessions' personal and professional history, as well as the administration's general stance on race, the reactionary gutting of the civil rights division of the DOJ, killing or shrinking federal police reform programs, the spotlight on police brutality (particularly racial disparities), Black Lives Matter, and every other context for an agenda that reassures sheriffs of their rightful place in the social hierarchy.
So again, I don't reject the possibility that Sessions decided to depart from his script simply to show off some trivia knowledge, I just reject its plausibility in the face of all above. It is by far the more bizarre take, imo.
They came with white hands and left with red hands.