Imagine if, in 2016, Donald Trump had put forth a nominee to head the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division whose body of work included the following statement:

Melanin endows whites with greater mental, physical and spiritual abilities — something which cannot be measured based on Afrocentric standards.

Setting aside the scientific idiocy of the statement, it’s hard to see it as anything other than the very definition of racism. And had anything like this ever been put on paper by a Trump nominee, the nomination would’ve been pulled as soon as the outrageous utterance came to light. But swap out the word “whites” for “blacks,” and replace “Afrocentric” with “Eurocentric,” and we’re looking at a verbatim quote from a Joe Biden nominee — to head our nation’s powerful civil rights enforcement apparatus, no less.

Granted, Kristen Clarke coauthored these words back in 1994 as part of a letter to the editor of the Harvard Crimson. But she did so as president of the university’s Black Students Association. That’s her name at the bottom of the letter, and those are her words. And they’re repugnant.

The letter, in fact, is little more than a semi-coherent screed that thrashes around between racist pseudoscience and pathetic blame-whiteyism.

First the pseudoscience: “Some scientists,” they claim without attribution, “have revealed that most whites are unable to produce melanin because their pineal glands are often calcification [sic] or non-functioning. Pineal calcification rates with Africans are five to 15 percent, Asians 15 to 25 percent and Europeans 60 to 80 percent. This is the chemical basis for the cultural differences between Blacks and whites.”

Now the blame-whiteyism: “Liberal whites underestimate the damage which racism causes on the minds of Black children, and conservative whites know all too well how to enlarge that damage. No matter how rich or supportive a Black person’s home might be, by the time she is ready to take the SAT or apply to college, she has struggled far more extensively than any white person of the same social and economic background.”

As a student, though, Clarke wasn’t content to merely castigate whites generally. She seems to have had a heightened animus toward Jews. Indeed, she once invited a raging anti-Semite to speak at Harvard, a former Wellesley College professor named Tony Martin — a man who authored a manifesto called “The Jewish Onslaught.” When the criticism came down, she vigorously — albeit sophomorically — defended him: “Professor Martin is an intelligent, well-versed Black intellectual who bases his information on indisputable fact.”

Got that? He’s an intellectual. Incidentally, if you missed Tucker Carlson’s Monday night takedown of our nation’s would-be civil rights top cop, it’s worth watching:

Carlson covered Clarke again last night, but this time he focused on her obsession with skin color when it comes to hiring airline pilots and on her dishonest Wikipedia biography, which doesn’t have a peep about her racist past. It’s also currently locked, so no one can correct it. Clearly, the Left is circling the wagons.

Despite their best efforts, though, it appears that Clarke’s troubling past has caught up with her just in time for a contentious confirmation. As The Washington Free Beacon reports, “Though the incendiary statements are more than 25 years old, several of President Donald Trump’s judicial nominees were grilled over comparatively tamer items they wrote as college students, prompting public apologies and even a withdrawal. If confirmed, Clarke would shape federal litigation strategies and lead enforcement of the nation’s civil-rights statutes.”

Are her quarter-century-old comments disqualifying, or is there a statute of limitations on black supremacy? Not according to Clarke’s own standards, as Paul Mirengoff points out at Power Line. Hey, what’s good enough for a Trump judicial nominee is good enough for a Biden civil rights nominee.

With a racist like Clarke at the helm, the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division would once again count by race, once again weaponize our nation’s civil rights laws, and once again favor certain racial groups at the expense of others. For the sake of decency, let’s hope her nomination gets pulled or, better yet, goes down to bipartisan defeat.