“If you want to call me an activist attorney general, I will proudly accept that label,” he said in an interview published in The Hill. “Any attorney general who is not an activist is not doing his or her job. The responsibility of the attorney general is to change things [and] bring us closer to the ideals expressed in our founding documents.”

Holder’s remarks were made in reference to critics who questions the Justice Department’s ongoing review of “policies [with] disproportionate impact on communities of color.”

“There are still [racial] issues we as a society are working our way through,” Holder said. “And the lack of desire to do that, I think, undermines the ability that I think is inherent in the American people to make progress. But it also does not prepare us for demographic changes, the likes of which this country has never seen.”