Progressive Racism. David Horowitz
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once moved a nation. On one screen, a crowd of well-dressed young men and women perpetually braves police dogs and water-hoses, vainly attempting to turn them back. It is a powerful tribute to a movement and leader that were able to win battles against overwhelming odds by exerting moral force over an entire nation.
As a visitor reaches the end of the hall, however, a corner turns to a jarring, discordant sight. Two familiar faces stare out from a wall-size monument that seems strangely out of place. The faces are Malcolm X and Elijah Muhammad, leaders of the Nation of Islam. Aside from one of King himself, there are no other portraits of similar dimension in the museum. It is clear that its creators intended to establish these men along with King as spiritual avatars of the civil rights cause.
For one old enough to have supported King, such a view seems incomprehensible. At the time of these struggles, Malcolm X was King’s great antagonist in the black community, leading its resistance to the civil rights hope. The Black Muslim publicly scorned King’s March on Washington as “ridiculous” and predicted the failure of the civil rights movement King led because the white man would never willingly give black Americans such rights. He rejected King’s call to non-violence and his goal of an integrated society, and in so doing earned the disapproval of the American majority that King had wooed and was about to win. Malcolm even denied King’s racial authenticity, redefining the term “Negro”—which King and his movement had used to describe themselves—to mean “Uncle Tom.”
King was unyielding in the face of these attacks. To clarify his opposition to Malcolm X’s racism, King refused to appear on any platform with him, effectively banning Malcolm from the community of respect. The other heads of the principal civil rights organizations, the NAACP’s Roy Wilkins and the Urban League’s Whitney Young, joined King in enforcing this ban. It was only in the last year of Malcolm’s life, when the civil rights cause was all but won, and when Malcolm had left the Nation of Islam and rejected its racism, that King finally relented and agreed to appear in the now-famous photograph of the two that became iconic after their deaths.
This very reconciliation—more a concession on Malcolm’s part than King’s—might argue the appropriateness of Malcolm’s place in a civil rights museum. Malcolm certainly earned an important place in any historical tribute to the struggle of the descendants of Africans to secure dignity, equality, and respect in a society that had brought them to its shores as slaves. His understanding of the psychology of oppression, his courage in asserting the self-confidence and pride of black Americans and his final conversion might make him worthy of inclusion in the temple of a man who was never a racist and whose movement he scorned.
But what about Elijah Muhammad? What is a racist and the founder of a hate cult doing in a monument to the civil rights movement and Martin Luther King? In contrast to Malcolm’s portrait, Elijah Muhammad’s is a truly perverse intrusion. The teachings of Elijah Muhammad mirror the white supremacist doctrines of the Southern racists against whom King and the civil rights movement did battle. According to Elijah’s teachings, white people were invented 6,000 years ago by a mad scientist named Yacub, in a failed experiment to dilute the blood of human beings who at the time were all black. The result was a morally tainted strain of humanity—“white devils” who went on to devastate the world and oppress all other human beings, and whom God would one day destroy in a liberating Armageddon. Why is the image of this bizarre racist blown up several times life-size to form the iconography of a National Civil Rights Museum? It is as though someone had placed a statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest in the Lincoln Memorial.
After leaving the museum, it occurred to me that this image reflected a truth about the afterlife of the movement King created, whose new leaders had squandered his moral legacy after his death. This decline is reflected in many episodes of the last quarter-century: the embrace of racist demagogues like Louis Farrakhan and Al Sharpton; the indefensible causes of Tawana Brawley, O.J. Simpson, the Los Angeles race rioters and numerous others; the Million Man March on Washington, organized by the racist leader of the Nation of Islam and cynically designed to appropriate the moral mantle of King’s historic event.
The impact of such episodes is compounded by the silence of black civil rights leaders over racial outrages committed by African-Americans against non-black groups—the anti-Korean incitements of black activists in New York, the mob attacks by black gangs on Asian and white storeowners during the Los Angeles riot, the lynching of a Hasidic Jew by a black mob in Crown Heights, and a black jury’s acquittal of his murderer. The failures of civil rights leaders like Jesse Jackson, Kweisi Mfume and Julian Bond to condemn black racists, or black outrages committed against other ethnic communities, have been striking in contrast to the demands such leaders make on the consciences of whites—or to the moral example set by King when he dissociated his movement from the racist preaching of Malcolm X.
The moral abdication of black civil rights leaders is integrally related to their close association with a radical left whose anti-white hatreds are a by-product of their anti-Americanism. As a result of this alliance, ideological hatred of whites is now an expanding industry, not only in the African-American community but among white “liberals” in elite educational institutions as well.11 Harvard’s prestigious W.E.B. Du Bois Institute, for example, provided an academic platform for lecturer Noel Ignatiev to launch “whiteness studies,” an academic field promoting the idea that “whiteness” is an oppressive “social construct” which must be “abolished.”
Jim Sleeper, Liberal Racism, Viking, 1997.
The magazine Race Traitor is the theoretical organ of this academic cult, emblazoned with the motto: “Treason to Whiteness is Loyalty to Humanity.” This is hardly a new theme on the left, echoing, as it does, Susan Sontag’s equally perverse claim that “the white race is the cancer of history.” (Sontag eventually expressed regrets about her remark, not because it was a racial smear, but out of deference to cancer patients who might feel unjustly slurred.) According to the Race Traitor intellectuals, “whiteness” is the principal scourge of mankind, an idea that Louis Farrakhan promoted at the Million Man March when he declared that the world’s “number one problem . . . is white supremacy.” Consequently, according to Race Traitor, “the key to solving the social problems of our age is to abolish the white race.” The new racism expresses itself in slogans directly out of the radical Sixties. According to the Whiteness Studies revolutionaries, “the abolition of whiteness” must be accomplished “by any means necessary.” To underscore that this slogan means exactly what it says, the editors of Race Traitor have explicitly embraced the military strategy of American neo-Nazis and the militia movement, and call for a John Brown-style insurrection that would trigger a second American civil war.
These attitudes promote a widespread denigration of Jews, Arabs, Central Europeans, Mediterranean Europeans, East Indians and Armenians—who are multi-ethnic and often dark-skinned, but who for official purposes (and under pressure from civil rights groups) are designated “white.” Unlike anti-black attitudes, which are universally decried, and would trigger the expulsion of their purveyors from any liberal institution in America, this racism is not only permitted but encouraged, especially in the academic culture responsible for the moral and intellectual instruction of tomorrow’s elites.
An anthology of the first five years of Race Traitor has been published by Routledge, a prestigious, academic-oriented publishing house, and was the winner of the 1997 American Book Award. Its jacket features praise by Harvard professor Cornel West, who writes: “Race Traitor is the most visionary, courageous journal in America.” West’s featured role as a speaker at the Million Man March and his coziness with Farrakhan have done nothing to tarnish his own academic reputation, his popularity with students or his standing in the civil rights community. The same is true of Afrocentrist racists like Derrick Bell and the late John Henrik Clarke, who have also been honored voices among the academic elites for decades, often running entire departments. By contrast, a distinguished Harvard scholar, Stephan Thernstrom, who is white, was driven out of his classroom by black student leftists who decided that his lectures on slavery were politically incorrect because they didn’t reflect prevailing leftist prejudices.
In recent decades, anti-white racism has, in fact, become a common currency of the “progressive” intelligentsia.