Jeff Sessions makes many people nervous for good reasons. Donald Trump’s nominee for attorney general of the United States allegedly called an African American lawyer on his staff “boy” when he was a US attorney in the 1980s. He said the Ku Klux Klan was OK, except that its members smoked marijuana. And he prosecuted storied civil rights legends for registering poor blacks to vote. He is also opposed to voting rights – which is one of the key provisions that the attorney general is entrusted to safeguard and fight for.

No wonder some want to re-educate him.

Senator Dick Durbin, the second-highest ranking Democrat in Congress, handed the nominee a copy of my book, White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of our Racial Divide. He hoped that Sessions would read it so that the Alabaman would at least know the history of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) and how – under the guise of protecting democracy – the courts, presidents, legislators and governors have done everything possible to undermine African Americans’ access to the ballot box.

Durbin’s attempt to educate Sessions was real. The Alabama senator’s statements and actions indicate a serious misunderstanding of how the Voting Rights Act worked and what it was designed to accomplish. The VRA emerged out of vast disfranchisement of black voters. Places such as Lowndes County, Alabama, in the early 1960s had 0% of a sizeable African American age-eligible population registered.

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After the bloodbath in Selma, the nation finally moved. But the bill required repeated reauthorization. During 2006, Sessions, although he eventually voted for the measure, complained that it was unfair because it singled out the south. That portrayal was beyond inaccurate.

The VRA applied to those jurisdictions that had a pattern of discriminating against American citizens based on race or language. So, yes, large areas in the south were covered because decades after the passage of the bill, many continued to try to suppress or dilute the African American vote.

But, contrary to Sessions’ portrayal of southern victimization, the VRA also applied to areas in California, New York, Alaska, Arizona, and more. Sessions, frankly, should have known that.

Then in 2014, the Alabama senator refused to support a bill to repair the damage to voting rights done by the previous year’s supreme court decision in Shelby County v. Holder. The 5-4 decision sanctioned the gerrymandered district lines of Shelby County, Alabama, which were successfully drawn to eliminate the lone African American on city council.

The supreme court’s ill-conceived ruling allowed states and municipalities to implement voting requirements, redraw boundaries and more without prior Department of Justice approval. Sessions seemed pleased.

He was convinced that the need for the VRA was over because in “Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina, people aren’t being denied the vote because of the color of their skin”, he said. Well, that was true as long as the VRA was intact, but with its intentional hobbling, all of America’s racist demons came out to play.

Immediately after the supreme court’s decision, Texas passed a draconian voter suppression law, SB14, that disenfranchised more than 1 million Texans. The federal courts ruled repeatedly that SB14 was discriminatory. Similarly, beginning in 2013, North Carolina, Ohio and Wisconsin openly targeted black voters.

Yet when the proposed 2014 Congressional bill to address the gaping holes in the VRA left by Shelby County came up for discussion, Sessions openly opposed the measure. He had earlier given voice to the voter fraud fig leaf used to cover racial discrimination at the polls, although there were only 31 documented instances out of one billion votes between 2000 and 2014.

Sessions minimized the damage to voting rights brought about by the ruling, saying: “The supreme court only struck down a small part and there remains very powerful provisions ... to stop any form of discriminatory voting actions.” He also fell back on the stance that the south was still being singled out.

“To pass a law in the US Congress that provides penalties only to some states and not to others can only be justified for the most extraordinary circumstances. And,” Sessions confidently asserted, “the justification no longer exists.” Once again, he was wrong.

Texas, Wisconsin, North Carolina and other states targeted black voters, as the Fourth Circuit noted in the North Carolina case, “with nearly surgical precision”, wreaking electoral havoc. Alabama was among the most blatant offenders.

In 2015, after passing a law requiring a certain type of government-issued photo ID to vote and disallowing others (such as public housing ID), Alabama’s governor ordered the Department of Motor Vehicles closed in counties that just happened to have sizeable black populations. Huge public protest led the governor to retreat, but just barely.

He finally agreed to have the DMVs opened but, he made clear, for only one day a month. And, yet, Sessions still insists that race and racism is not in play at the ballot box.

Durbin was right to want to educate a man who could be the nation’s chief legal officer, responsible for ensuring that the right to vote is not impaired, impeded or denied. Whether Sessions is ready to learn, however, is the question.