This Obama crew is more racially divisive than any administration and campaign in memory.

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News on four fronts in one week give further evidence, as if any still were needed, that the Obama administration actively and fiercely acts from an ugly, racialist mindset. The first two developments are attitudinal; the other two, more serious in the long term, involve specific legal positions taken, or ducked, by Attorney General Eric Holder’s lawless Department of Justice (DoJ).

By far the least important, but still attitudinally instructive, was Wednesday’s Daily Caller report that as a third-year law student, First Lady Michelle Obama “argued for race-based faculty hiring.” Harking back to a college essay and even a sit-in, especially by spouse rather than a direct policy-maker, doesn’t necessarily constitute a fair assessment of administration policy – but when it comports so closely with so many other administration actions, which in this case it does, it does add further to an overall picture of a presidency that sees the world through an extremely heightened racial prism.

This comes on top of Vice President Joe Biden’s racially charged accusation before a largely black audience that Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney would put people “back in chains.” That remark seems less like a mere slip of the lip when combined with other recent administration comments also ratcheting up racial sensitivities, such as Barack Obama’s statement that deceased Florida teen Trayvon Martin “would look like my son” and the long-running race-baiting involved in portraying voter-ID laws as a resurgence of Jim Crow.

The third recent example, this one quite explicit, of racialist approaches came Monday when the administration filed a brief in the pending Supreme Court case of Fisher v. University of Texas, in which the Obama team supported the school’s use of racial preferences in admissions decisions. It argues, bizarrely, that this serves not just the interests of diversity in general but also that it is vital for the military’s recruiting needs in drawing on a “racially and ethnically diverse range of graduates who are prepared to lead a multiracial force.” This is poppycock. And as three members of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights have noted, ample social science research shows that racial preferences lead to minorities graduating, and succeeding in their intended professions, at lower rates than they otherwise would if they attended less selective schools for which their prior training had well prepared them.

Fourth, and most below the public radar despite an excellent July 16 column in NRO by John Fund, the Holder DoJ is committing a huge act of omission by refusing to intervene against a hideously racist (not just racialist) move by leaders in the territory of Guam. Those leaders plan to hold a plebiscite on Guam’s status (as U.S. state, “free association” entity, or independent nation) open only to “native inhabitants” and their descendants. Let’s repeat that: Guam plans to hold a referendum on whether to stay a U.S. territory, but to exclude “63 percent of the island’s 155,000 residents” from even registering for the election because, even though they are citizens, they aren’t “native.”

In other words, in effect, they are not of the local “Chamorro” race. The results would then be “transmit[ted] …  to the President and the Congress of the United States of America, and to the Secretary General of the United Nations” as a valid representation of the “desire” of natives for a change, in some fashion, from their territorial status. This election would be held after “an extensive public information program, throughout the island,” according to the official language of the plan.

This is as clear a violation of the Constitution and of various civil rights laws as can be imagined. It also directly flies in the face of the year 2000 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Rice v. Cayetano, negating a similar scheme attempted in Hawaii.

This overtly racist referendum is supported, amazingly enough, by the Republican attorney general, Leonardo M. Rapadas, who appears to be pandering both to native voters and to the Holder DoJ. (Presumably, an incoming Romney administration would never appoint him or his ilk to any other coveted post.) A motion to dismiss the case is now in front of Judge Frances Tydingco-Gatewood – a motion that any other DoJ leadership should and would oppose in an instant. But the Holder team repeatedly has refused to intervene, refused to enforce civil rights laws and principles as it is obviously obligated to do.

This all stems back, directly, to orders issued by former Obama-Holder DoJ civil rights official Julie Fernandes, who in several different contexts told lawyers in the division that she would only selectively enforce various civil rights laws. DoJ’s non-involvement in this case isn’t a mere oversight; it is a deliberate decision to let the racist referendum proceed.

This Obama crew is more racially divisive than any administration and campaign in memory. How sickening.