Janine Jackson interviewed Omar Farah about the Department of Homeland Security’s “Race Paper” on the March 23, 2018, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: Listeners know the US government has a shameful history of surveilling and intimidating people engaged in First Amendment-protected acts of public protest or public criticism. Black activists have for decades been victims of campaigns to demonize, harass and discredit them and their movements.
So when racial justice groups — using the Freedom of Information Act to find out how the FBI and Department of Homeland Security are monitoring protests around police violence and the Movement for Black Lives — turn up a document referred to as the “Race Paper,” which, on receipt, turns out to be completely redacted, with not even the official title visible, it makes for a handy emblem…but just an emblem of a problem that’s far deeper and more worrying.
Joining us now to talk about the “Race Paper” and what it may tell us is Omar Farah, staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights. He joins us now by phone, from here in town. Welcome to CounterSpin, Omar Farah.
Omar Farah: Thank you so much for having me.
The Center for Constitutional Rights and Color of Change have filed a lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security to get at the contents of this memo, based on the references to it that you could see. What do you suspect they’re hiding?
I think you have to start with the function of the agency that produced the report in order to get a sense of what it might say, and as you pointed out, it is entirely redacted. Every version of the document that we have is blacked-out, from the first word to the very last, and each report is roughly seven or eight pages. The sub-agency within the Department of Homeland Security that produced the report, and that itself calls it the “Race Paper,” is the Intelligence and Analysis Office, which is tasked with producing predictive…