Politics & Power Quote by Eric Holder

Holder’s line lands like a bureaucrat’s aside, but it’s really an indictment: after half a century of civil-rights legislation, some of the country’s most visible habits and hierarchies still snap back into place every weekend. The specificity of "Saturdays and Sundays" is the tell. He’s invoking the old maxim that 11 a.m. Sunday is the most segregated hour in America, pointing to how the workweek can force proximity while leisure time reveals preference, policing, and custom. Integration at the office, separation at church, at the ballfield, in neighborhoods, in who feels safe where.

The plain, slightly clunky phrasing ("does not in some ways differ significantly") reads like a lawyer trying not to overclaim. That caution is part of the subtext: he’s speaking as a top federal official in 2009, early in the Obama era, when "post-racial" talk was fashionable and politically useful. Holder is pushing back against the victory-lap narrative without sounding like he’s calling the whole project a failure. He names continuity, then delivers the blunt moral verdict: "This is truly sad". No policy prescription, no rhetorical fireworks, just a refusal to normalize the status quo.

Context matters, too: 2009 sits between the optimism of Obama’s election and the sharper backlash and polarization that would follow. Holder’s intent is to force recognition that legal change didn’t automatically rewrite social life. The sadness isn’t sentimental; it’s strategic. It frames segregation not as an abstract statistic but as a weekly ritual we keep choosing.