Endowed with a razor-thin Democratic majority, the United States Senate continues to consider President Joe Biden's appointments to his administration.
Among those appointments is civil rights attorney Kristen Clarke, whom Biden has tapped to head the Justice Department's Civil Rights division.
In a Wednesday Senate committee hearing on the appointment, Republican Senator John Cornyn of Texas attempted to trip Clarke up with a "gotcha" question about an essay she wrote while attending Harvard University.
Watch below.
Cornyn asked:
"Dating back to your days in school when you seemed to argue that African Americans were genetically superior to Caucasians. Is that correct?"
In her 1994 essay for the Harvard Crimson, Clarke was pointing out the logical fallacies of The Bell Curve, a book on class and intelligence by Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray. It continues to spark controversy for its emphasis on the disparities in IQ scores among Black people and white people, suggesting that race is an adequate indicator of a person's intelligence.
Clarke illustrated the absurdity of The Bell Curve's implications by claiming Black people were inherently superior to whites due to their melanin.
Clarke easily pointed out to Cornyn the intent of the piece.
"As a Black student at Harvard that time, we took grave offense to this book. It was co-authored by a Harvard professor. We held a number of events to speak out against the book, and this op-ed opened with a satirical reference to the statement that you just noted. ...What I was trying to do was to hold up a mirror and put one racist theory alongside another to challenge people as to why we were unwilling to wholly reject the racist theory that defined the Bell Curve book."
She went on to point out that contemporaneous reporting in the paper at the time confirmed this wasn't her actual position.
Cornyn's attempt to discredit Clarke ultimately backfired.
The Senator's face as Clarke explained the article was satire evoked mockery from many social media users.
If confirmed, Clarke will become the first woman of color to lead the Civil Rights division of the Justice Department.
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