[sixties-l] Who's afraid of the big, bad Horowitz?

From: radman (resist@best.com)
Date: Fri Mar 16 2001 - 02:37:05 EST

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    http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2001/03/09/horowitz/

    March 9, 2001

    Who's afraid of the big, bad Horowitz?

    By refusing to run his ad blasting reparations for slavery, cringing campus
    journalists are giving the racial provocateur publicity that money can't
    buy.

    By Joan Walsh

    David Horowitz is having a ball.

    Armed with a modest advertising budget, the conservative provocateur (and
    Salon columnist) set out to buy ads in college newspapers across the
    country, attacking the notion of slavery reparations: "Ten reasons why
    reparations for slavery is a bad idea -- and racist too." But so far at
    least 10 papers have rejected the ad, editors at three of the four that
    agreed to run it have since apologized and the result has been a windfall of
    free publicity for Horowitz and his case against reparations. The San
    Francisco Chronicle and the Wall Street Journal have come to Horowitz's
    defense; in the Washington Post, Jonathan Yardley called the attacks on the
    ad "hogwash," concluding "I have read the ad several times and can find no
    racism in it."

    "Now we're sending the ad to about 100 papers," an excited Horowitz says by
    cellphone, rushing from meeting to meeting. "We can't afford to place it
    everywhere, but since most are refusing to run it, we might as well try. Can
    you believe it? Harvard, Columbia, the University of Virginia all rejected
    it! I expected a hue and cry, but I never expected this." Horowitz hasn't
    gotten so much mainstream media attention since Time's Jack White called him
    a racist.

    Are these campus journalists secretly on Horowitz's payroll? Of course not,
    but they're working for him just the same. The rightist rabble-rouser is
    running circles around his ideological enemies, making idiots of them,
    winning thousands in free publicity for every dollar he tried to spend with
    the campus papers. Meanwhile, activists are taking to the streets again in
    Berkeley, Calif., and Madison, Wis. -- which might be a welcome sign of life
    on the mostly dormant campus left if their cause wasn't so insufferably
    self-destructive.

    Lost in the ruckus over the reparations ad is the fact that Salon ran a
    version of it as Horowitz's biweekly column last June. The column ran at
    greater length than the ad, and was more carefully edited, perhaps (full
    disclosure: I edited it, and I'm pretty sure I wrote that catchy headline),
    but it made essentially the same points. Of his 10 points, most are
    variations on the argument that forcing Americans to pay for reparations
    would be unjust, in large part because it would be difficult, if not
    impossible, to decide exactly who should pay them. Black Africans, brown
    Arabs as well as white Europeans were involved in the slave trade, while the
    immigrant ancestors of most white Americans were not. And should whites who
    are descended from abolitionists and other slavery opponents get an
    exemption?

    We received hundreds of letters about the column, most but not all of them
    critical. We ran a rejoinder by a regular Salon contributor, Earl Ofari
    Hutchinson, supporting reparations. We got even more letters, as Horowitz
    supporters slammed Hutchinson. The debate was lively, arguments on all sides
    got thoroughly aired, a good time was had by all.

    Nobody picketed our offices. Nobody came to Salon with a list of grievances
    to be addressed. Nobody sought or was given an apology. Nobody called us
    racist.

    Why, then, is Horowitz's ad campaign stirring up such craziness on college
    campuses? On this point, at least, it's hard to avoid agreeing with my
    conservative colleague. (And as he knows, I respectfully disagree with him
    on just about everything.) The Horowitz ad is explosive because for too many
    years campuses have been places where ideological bullies, usually on the
    left, have been devoted to blocking political debate, rather than engaging
    in it -- and they've succeeded.

    I've become a conscientious objector in the war over political correctness
    in American universities. There are more important issues to me, and campus
    p.c. crackpots are just too easy a target. Besides, it seems overwrought to
    insist that hotheaded identity-politics power-struggling by self-important,
    hormone-addled, coming-of-age undergrads (even though it's abetted by
    doctrinaire professors) is any kind of microcosm for the state of American
    race relations, politics or civic life.

    Plus, in the Horowitz fracas, the campus journalists and activists being
    interviewed seem overmatched by the adults piling on, and I've been a little
    reluctant to join the fray. These are students, after all. Poor Daniel
    Hernandez, editor of the Daily Californian at UC-Berkeley, has become a
    poster boy for political correctness run amok -- and the crisis in liberal
    education -- with his apology for having run the Horowitz ad. Jonathan
    Yardley attacked him for bad grammar -- two split infinitives! -- as well as
    bad reasoning. As someone who can't resist splitting an infinitive now and
    then, my heart went out to Hernandez. The executive editor of Foxnews.com,
    Scott Norvell, took time from his busy day to write a personal e-mail to
    young Hernandez, attacking his "cowardice and audacity" in apologizing for
    the ad. "I'm getting letters from journalists all over the country telling
    me I'll never get a job in journalism again," the editor admits gloomily.

    But if the piling on is unseemly, Hernandez brought it on himself. He
    defends his apology, though he admits he might have put it differently had
    it not been written in the heat of a clash with campus activists who'd
    stormed the Daily Cal offices to protest the ad. "It was purposely
    confrontational," he says of the ad, explaining, "We don't run any ad that's
    blatantly inflammatory -- that's just our policy." It's probably worth
    noting that most media outlets reserve the right to reject controversial
    ads, and regularly do. But it's also worth noting that Horowitz's
    anti-reparations position is thoroughly mainstream: A Time poll of about
    30,000 respondents showed 75 percent were opposed to reparations for
    slavery.

    "Our editorial policy is as open as it can be," Hernandez continues. When I
    ask if he's ever run an editorial feature as "confrontational" on the
    question of race as the Horowitz ad, he admits he hasn't.

    In the end it's probably condescending to protect these student journalists
    and activists from themselves, especially when they so desperately need
    serious intellectual engagement. The reaction to Horowitz's ad proves at
    least one of the points he makes in it: A morbid attraction to the role of
    victim, and an unhealthy fear of disagreeable ideas, are all too common in
    campus politics, and they seem to afflict left-liberal students of color
    disproportionately.

    Horowitz is a provocateur on questions of race, I'll admit. Sending his
    piece to college newspapers was a provocation (one he justifies by saying
    it's the only way he could open a discussion of the subject on campuses),
    and sending it during Black History Month poured more gas on the fire. If
    Horowitz seems a little unhinged on the subject, the reason may be his
    painful personal history. Hell hath no fury like a white person who once
    idealized blacks who's since been disappointed by them. Horowitz, the
    recovering Negrophile (sorry, there's no modern, polite word for it) often
    seems to blame the entire race for the admittedly vile outrages of the Black
    Panthers, who he believes (with convincing evidence) murdered his friend
    Betty Van Patter.

    Just the way he once romanticized black outlaws -- as so many white leftists
    do, accounting for Panther worship in the '70s and the creepy Mumia cult
    today -- Horowitz now inflates black leaders' moral and political flaws. And
    much the way he glorified the long-suffering black community's capacity for
    both redemption and radicalism, he now exaggerates its problems and
    pathologies. When he sent the reparations ad out as part of a direct-mail
    fundraising package, it was accompanied by a letter warning darkly about a
    couple of recent murders of whites by blacks, which he likes to call "hate
    crimes," as though it's open season on white folks and our only defense is
    giving money to his nonprofit. Horowitz is frankly obsessed with blacks, to
    what seems an unhealthy degree, and as a colleague I've been tempted to ask
    him to give it a rest.

    But while I don't agree with everything in his reparations ad, it is
    actually one of his more persuasive arguments. Typically, Horowitz
    overreaches, calling welfare benefits a form of reparations to blacks, even
    though most welfare recipients are white. But he also makes an excellent
    point that his detractors refuse to grant: Slavery was a worldwide
    phenomenon, and Americans deserve some credit for a multiracial movement to
    end it. And by refusing to acknowledge that complicated history, reparations
    advocates risk cultivating a sense of alienation, isolation and victimhood
    among African-Americans that's ultimately self-destructive.

    In my reading, the ad is not racist. Provocative, sure. Offensive to some,
    probably. Unfit to grace the ad pages of a college newspaper? Give me a
    break.

    Of course, like virtually everybody else writing about this mess, I'm a
    grown-up college journalist myself, and the controversy just happens to be
    hottest right now at my alma mater, the University of Wisconsin. There, a
    conservative student newspaper, the Badger Herald, ran the Horowitz ad, and
    has since been subject to attacks and demonstrations against its "racist
    propaganda" by student activists. Meanwhile, the official UW paper, the
    Daily Cardinal -- where I was campus editor in 1978 -- ran an ad purchased
    by the Multicultural Students Coalition attacking the Horowitz ad.
    Ironically, the Badger Herald refused the coalition's ad, proving that
    intellectual intolerance can be found on the right as well as the left. But
    the Cardinal ran the students' ad "because we felt that as a newspaper it's
    our position to provide our pages for anybody to purchase," sophomore Eric
    Storck, the paper's business manager, told the Wisconsin State Journal.

    That's my Cardinal, I thought proudly -- still representing the proud
    tradition of free-speech absolutism. I came of age when the paper was
    unabashedly left-wing -- it's more centrist now -- and I remember
    interminable staff meetings devoted to arguing about taking ads from
    politically incorrect advertisers. But in the end, we always took them. At
    the time, our free-speech commitment was articulated with a macho lefty
    swagger: You take the money of advertisers you disagree with, and then you
    screw them with it, printing stories and editorials decrying whatever cause
    the advertiser represents.

    Alongside an ad from South Africa-based De Beers diamonds, for instance, we
    ran a long, tortured expos of conditions for blacks in De Beers' mining
    camps written by yours truly. We were ham-handed and self-righteous and
    close-minded in our way, but we were willing to let ideas clash. Certainly
    we had enemies on the left, who opposed what they saw as our bourgeois
    free-speech fetish. But I admit we never faced the fashionable multi-culti
    marauders who descend on college papers and try to punish those who publish
    anything that offends their sense of racial purity. Though I'd like to think
    we'd have stood up to them, I really don't know.

    But I do know that fearlessness appears to be in short supply among both
    activists and journalists on campus today. I called Eric Storck at the
    Cardinal to congratulate him on continuing the paper's free-speech legacy. I
    asked if he'd been offered the reparations ad yet -- I knew Horowitz was in
    the process of approaching the Cardinal -- and Storck, a little embarrassed,
    told me he wouldn't sell Horowitz ad space right now.

    "At this point I wouldn't take it. It's clear the message has already gotten
    on to this campus, and I don't feel the need to rekindle feelings that have
    already been stirred," he said haltingly.

    The Cardinal regularly takes provocative ads, Storck admitted -- it recently
    accepted an ad from an anti-abortion group that both staff members and
    community activists argued should have been rejected. Why the different
    standards for the reparations ad?

    "I'm not gonna say we wouldn't have taken it two weeks ago, but with all the
    protest and everything, now we would not take it," he said.

    So the fact that some activists picketed the Badger Herald means that
    Horowitz won't be able to place his ad?

    "Yes. In this specific case, yes. There's anger on campus now. Given the
    circumstances right now, it would be inappropriate for us to run that ad.
    With the discussions regarding race on campus, it's just not an appropriate
    ad. The Multicultural Coalition is very upset."

    Horowitz is now calling his detractors "brownshirts," of course, and on the
    phone he reminds me "the Nazis took over universities first." It's a little
    overheated. And yet there is something disturbing about the idea that a
    group of offended students could intimidate student newspapers into
    rejecting Horowitz's ad, or apologizing for it once they'd accepted it.

    Leave it to the left to give Horowitz an issue that gives his take on race
    and political correctness new life and new credibility. "To be honest, we
    feel kind of duped by this man," Daniel Hernandez of the Daily Cal admits.
    "He's gotten more exposure than any ad could have given him. It's kind of
    embittering."

    Indeed it is. But it's an important lesson for Hernandez and his
    contemporaries. They could have taken Horowitz's money and, if they despised
    his arguments, screwed him with it, attacking his arguments in the same
    pages he paid good money to have his words published. By refusing his money,
    spineless campus journalists are getting screwed by him instead.

    - - - - - - - - - - - -
    About the writer
    Joan Walsh is the editor of Salon News.



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