Immediately after President Barack Obama nominated the highly-qualified and widely respected Debo Adegbile to be the next assistant attorney general for civil rights at the Department of Justice, right-wing media attacked this top lawyer of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund for purportedly being a “racialist.”

Writing on an obscure right-wing blog, J. Christian Adams, a frequent Fox News guest who served in the highly politicized and disgraced Bush-era DOJ and "whose claim to fame as a federal lawyer seems to be his penchant for accusing black people of discriminating against whites," accused Adegbile of “racialis[m]” and the venerable NAACP Legal Defense Fund of a “radical racial agenda.” From a November 14 post on Pajamas Media:

Adegbile hails from the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, an organization that has pushed a radical racial agenda including attacks on election integrity measures, opposition to criminal background checks for hiring, and racial hiring quotas for state and local governments. [...] Adegbile's name was mentioned as a possible nominee to the federal bench. Because of his advocacy for racialist policies, such a nomination would face serious confirmation difficulties. But in Eric Holder's Justice Department, nakedly racialist policies are standard fare, and Adegbile will fit right in. This is an an-your-face nomination. This is the White House sending a message to Republicans and conservatives that the radical racial policies of the Justice Department will continue full speed ahead. [...] [I]n the Obama Justice Department, the law is not as important as the cause. And with Adegbile, the cause is racialist.

In another context, the venue and content of this thinly-veiled insinuation of so-called reverse racism could be easily ignored. Unfortunately, on the topic of executive and judicial nominees of the current president, Adams' attack is disturbingly similar to the same sort of race-baiting that jumps from little-read blogs to prominent right-wing platforms like Fox News, the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal, National Review Online, and even the mouths of GOP congressmen engaged in the ongoing blanket filibustering of the president's diverse nominees.

Accusing select presidential nominees of racialism or anti-white bias is a tired page of right-wing media's playbook against those who litigate and uphold longstanding civil rights precedent, a body of law that tends to help most those systematically disadvantaged by racism. This rant has been directed with more or less subtlety at Labor Secretary Thomas Perez (who previously led the DOJ's Civil Rights Division), Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, and Attorney General Eric Holder.

Assumedly, these charges have some sort of salience with those unfamiliar with American history and basic civil rights law.

Beyond the name-calling and dog whistle politics, however, the substance of this alleged hostility to whites and the criticism of the nominees' qualifications is quite thin. Adams' substantive attack on Adegbile, for example, is basically limited to pointing out he was involved in the legal defense of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which the conservative Justices ultimately gutted in a bitterly split opinion. That is, Adegbile joins the line of famous and talented lawyers who have at one time lost a case before the Supreme Court, a long list that includes other such wild-eyed radicals as conservative Chief Justice John Roberts, who didn't win 14.

In sum, Adegbile is a famous defender of civil rights. This is, apparently, a big problem for right-wing media.