Politics with Marc Ambinder

Mara Gay

Recently by Mara Gay

Jul 17 2009, 10:42AM

When White Males Have "Empathy"

There is perhaps no one who knows the cost of "selective empathy" better than Senator Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III. It's the reason his own nomination to the federal court died in the Senate 23 years ago.  

Long before the Belizean Grove found its groove, Sessions was on the stand himself, defending his nomination against claims that he practiced a form of "selective empathy" as old as the United States itself: the kind where white men can only find compassion for other white men. Accusations of racial insensitivity and prejudice dominated the 1986 hearings.

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