http://www.salon.com/news/col/horo/2001/04/02/reparations/index.html
April 2, 2001
My 15 minutes
"I couldn't be more pleased by the attention," columnist David Horowitz
says, as the controversy over his anti-reparations ad rages on.
By David Horowitz
My Andy Warhol moment has come just as I had hoped it would: on offense,
baiting the left. The ad I wrote and recently attempted to place in 50
college newspapers challenged a racial orthodoxy that is suffocating the
promise of American pluralism and pitting ethnic communities against one
another. It is sinking African-Americans into a sea of negativism and
hostile posturing that threatens to isolate them and sabotage attempts to
elevate those who have been left behind. Denouncing as "racist," "not
legitimate" and "anti-civil rights" a president who has brought more
diversity to Washington than any of his predecessors, and has vowed to
"leave no child behind," is just one emblem of the moral and political
bankruptcy of the current civil rights leadership. Claiming "reparations for
slavery" 136 years after the fact is quite another.
As a result of the ad I attempted to place drawing attention to this
problem, I have been predictably attacked as a racial provocateur and a
racist. Those smears are the reason no one else has tried this before me.
The smears and attacks are also the reason, ironically, that so much
attention has been paid to this issue. More than twice as many editors have
refused my ad as have agreed to publish it (the actual score is 34-14), even
though I offered to pay for the space to run it. Only eight college papers
have been able to print it without incident. Six editors who published it
have been visited by howling mobs, and three of those have decided to
apologize for doing so. At the University of Wisconsin, Brown and Duke,
editors have courageously stood up to mobs bent on intimidating them. The
net result has been to bring the issue of intellectual freedom on American
college campuses -- and, to a lesser extent, the ad itself -- before
millions of Americans who otherwise would have been unaware of them.
I couldn't be more pleased by the attention these issues are getting. And I
know from my e-mails, and from the widespread support I have gotten in the
press, that other Americans who cherish their freedoms are also pleased.
What's going on here? When I stepped onto the stage last month in the Life
Sciences Building at the University of California at Berkeley, accompanied
by 30 armed campus police, I was reminded of the old Richard Pryor album
cover in which he appears cowering, half-naked and surrounded by hooded
Klansmen who are about to lynch him. The cover line is: "Is it something I
said?"
Actually, it was something I said. Any understanding of the current
controversy can only be gleaned by first focusing on that fact. How is it
that the expression of ideas -- let alone ideas shared by a majority of
Americans (a Time poll indicates that 74 percent of the public is opposed to
reparations) -- should result in a university having to assign 30 armed
police escorts to protect me during my campus appearance?
The answer is that we live in a time of racial McCarthyism. Fifty years ago,
witch hunters warned that there were "reds under the beds"; now it is
something like "racists in the heads" -- a closet bigot behind every white
face. There were in fact reds under the beds during the McCarthy era -- a
lot more of them (as recently opened Soviet archives show) than many had
previously thought. And, of course, there are still racists among us. The
problem of McCarthyism was the abuse of a reality that prompted legitimate
fear in people. McCarthy and his allies exploited those fears to achieve
political agendas unrelated to matters of national security. McCarthy
exaggerated the facts, made false accusations and used sinister innuendo to
assault his political opponents in the Democratic Party and to stifle
opposition from all quarters. Nobody wanted to be accused, however falsely,
of being a Communist, or coddling Communists or being associated with
Communists.
This is exactly what is happening on matters of race on our college campuses
and in the political arena today.
My reparations ad was a straightforward argument that blacks living today
are two, three and four generations removed from slavery. Hence, their claim
would not conform to existing reparations formulas as applied to victims of
the Holocaust, interned Japanese or survivors of the Rosewood race riot. The
claim, I argued, would pit the black community against all other ethnic
communities, and would focus blacks on their victim status and on negative
thoughts about their experience in America. It is possible, by way of
contrast, to look at African-Americans as a people who started literally
from nothing -- stripped of their language, culture and family roots. But
just 136 years later, thanks to their own efforts and the opportunities that
America afforded them, they are (statistically speaking) the 10th richest
nation in the world. Normally, such an attitude would be called
"empowering." In the dispute over my ad, however, it has been called
"racist."
In apologizing for his decision to publish my ad, the editor of the campus
paper at UC-Berkeley explained that the ad was a "vehicle for bigotry" -- a
weasel phrase typical of McCarthyism. What is a "vehicle for bigotry"? Does
it mean that someone might misread it and use it to promote bigotry? Does it
mean that facts or arguments appearing in the ad may be used by bigots
themselves? Or does it mean that some black person's feelings were hurt by
the ad, which on sensitivity-trained campuses is interpreted in these times
as tantamount to "racism"?
Actually, in these times and on campuses in particular, the definition of
racism is increasingly suspect. Case in point: The Badger-Herald, a
University of Wisconsin student paper, published the ad on Feb. 28. Five
days later, the rival student paper, the Daily Cardinal, published an ad
written by the Multicultural Students Coalition. The ad did not reply to the
10 points presented in my ad (and, to this date, there has not been a single
ad to my knowledge replying to those points). Instead the Cardinal ad
attacked the Badger-Herald as a "racist propaganda machine." The editorial
offices of the Badger-Herald were then besieged by a mob of 100 students
demanding the resignation of the paper's editor, Julie Bosman, and apologies
(for racism) from its staff. These are tactics that have a long and
regrettable history that originated with the fascist and communist mobs of
the '30s that were sent to break up the peaceful meetings of their social
democratic rivals. It's the politics of smear and intimidation, designed to
silence opposition and stamp out free speech. Nothing could be more inimical
to a university setting, yet not a single student involved in these
activities has been disciplined or reprimanded by the University of
Wisconsin administration.
Tshaka Barrows is a spokesperson for the Multicultural Students Coalition.
The Daily Cardinal interviewed her about her campaign:
Cardinal: Does the Horowitz ad fit your definition of racism?
Barrows: Exactly. Because of the reality of our society, his prejudice was
allowed to be institutionalized, and [16,000] of his statements were
presented to our campus. He was actively, as well as the Herald, exercising
their racism, their power to institutionalize their racism.
Cardinal: [What] is your definition of racism?
Barrows: Racism is having the power to institutionalize your prejudice.
In other words, my offense is publishing my ideas, which Barrows doesn't
like. (Her definition of racism, by the way, is a concoction of tenured
leftists that accomplishes the feat of defining racism in such a way that
"only whites can be racist.")
Insinuating racism -- without taking the trouble to establish actual
racism -- is the McCarthy method. It was on display in a column Jonathan
Alter wrote about me in the April 2 issue of Newsweek. A color photograph
illustrating the column was placed in the middle of the page. It showed one
of the student protesters at the UC-Berkeley carrying a sign with the words:
"PROTEST DAVID HOROWITZ, RACIST IDEOLOGUE." Alter's article made no
reference to the photo. Nor did it explain that the protesters were members
of the Spartacist Youth League, a Trotskyist splinter group whose members
also denounced me as a "capitalist running dog." The image was allowed to
just stand there, making me appear to be a theoretician for the Posse
Comitatus or some lunatic fringe group. In his column, Alter derisively
dismissed my complaint that I was under siege by "left-wing McCarthyism."
"Please. Newspapers, exercising their own freedom, routinely reject
advertising they believe might offend the sensibilities of their readers."
They do. But that's obviously not what happened in this case. Alter
attempted to discredit me by describing me as a member of "the extreme
right" when, in fact, I am a moderate on abortion, a defender of gays, a
strong supporter of civil rights and of large government programs to help
inner-city minority kids. What Alter did was use the McCarthy technique of
character assassination by exaggeration ("Professor Lattimore is Stalin's
chief agent in America"). Alter says that my reasoned ad "reminds [him] of
one of those tiresome rants supporting a NAAWP (National Association for the
Advancement of White People)" -- which would be classic guilt by
association, except that I am not associated with any group or anybody who
thinks like this. Finally, Alter imputes to me a mean-spirited agenda that I
have never had. "The not-so-subtle subtext [of the ad] was that we've given
'them' enough, and so should give up on addressing the continuing problems
of race and poverty in America." Since I am the architect of a congressional
bill to provide $100 billion in scholarships to inner-city minority kids,
this is hardly a just accusation. Its only purpose is to delegitimize me and
stigmatize me as a "racist."
A similar innuendo-laced attack was leveled by Washington Post columnist
Richard Cohen, who suggested that while I was not an actual racist, and
while "word for word, the ad makes sense," the editors were still justified
in not running it, and the campus fascists were really legitimately provoked
into their attacks on free speech. His reasoning? Apparently he found my
tone and address "insulting" and "offensive."
I'm not sure I can put my finger on what exactly offended me when I first
read the ad. It might have been its statement that blacks, as well as
whites, engaged in the slave trade and owned slaves. True enough, but only
blacks were slaves. It might have been the what's-the-big-deal tone to the
argument that almost all African Americans live so much better than almost
all Africans that they ought to be downright grateful that their ancestors
were kidnapped and dumped on the beach at Charleston. Or it might have been
Horowitz's assertion that welfare payments constitute reparations of a sort.
This is a downright insulting statement.
This justifies attacks on the editors of newspapers who ran the ad as the
managers of a "racist propaganda machine"? What Cohen forgets is that my ad
is not an article on reparations, it is a response to the claims of
reparations proponents -- a response that students would not be able to hear
if I hadn't decided to buy the space to provide them with an opposing point
of view.
What I find insulting is that the proponents of reparations have addressed
Americans as though white America, en masse, is solely responsible for
slavery. They also argue that white America is responsible for its real and
alleged aftereffects -- as though no apologies have ever been made for
slavery and no recognition of its horrors is on record, as though all the
deficiencies of black Americans (income gaps, education gaps and criminal
incarceration gaps) are attributable solely or even mainly to white racism
and as though all Americans who are not black should feel they owe a debt to
all Americans who are black. Now that's offensive.
But that is exactly the case made by Randall Robinson and every other
reparations proponent known to me. Has there been an apology for slavery or
a recognition by white America that slavery is evil? Of course there has.
Abraham Lincoln called slavery an offense to God. He said that every drop of
blood from the lash would be paid by a drop of blood from the sword, and
called the destruction of the South a judgment of the Lord. This was not in
an obscure speech -- it was in his Second Inaugural Address. What more in
the way of recognition could be asked?
And what is so insulting about the suggestion that welfare is a form of
reparations for injuries done by slavery and discrimination? If the entire
income gap between black Americans and other Americans is attributable to
slavery and its afterlife -- as Robinson and the reparations advocates
maintain -- then of course welfare could be considered an attempt to make up
that deficit and repair that injury. Welfare payments to African-Americans
represent a net transfer of wealth of more than a trillion dollars from
other communities to theirs. Should African-Americans be grateful for
slavery because they (incontrovertibly) live better in America than blacks
do in Africa today? Nobody in his right mind would say so, and I certainly
didn't.
What is at issue, really, in this campus tempest is not so much the right of
an individual to publish his views as it is the right of an individual to
publish reasonable views on race matters without being tarred and feathered
or stigmatized for life.
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About the writer
David Horowitz's odyssey from '60s radical to cultural conservative is
described in his autobiography, "Radical Son." He is the president of the
conservative Center for the Study of Popular Culture in Los Angeles and the
editor of FrontPage Magazine. For more columns by Horowitz, visit his column
archive.
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