Progressive Racism. David Horowitz
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State that the number-one problem in the world was white people, to Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, whose boundless suspicions of white America amount to a demonization almost as intense as Elijah Muhammad’s. In her introduction to an anthology about the O.J. Simpson case, Birth of a Nation ’Hood, for example, Morrison compared the symbolic meanings of the O.J. Simpson case to D.W. Griffith’s epic celebration of the Ku Klux Klan, insinuating that white America acted as the KKK in pursuing the guilty Simpson for the murders of Ron Goldman and Simpson’s ex-wife.
With university support, Race Traitor intellectuals in the field of “whiteness studies” have produced an entire library of “scholarly” works to incite hatred against white America, against “Euro-American” culture, and against American institutions in general. Thus, according to the editors of Race Traitor: “Just as the capitalist system is not a capitalist plot, race is not the work of racists. On the contrary, it is reproduced by the principal institutions of society, among which are the schools (which define ‘excellence’), the labor market (which defines ‘employment’), the law (which defines ‘crime’), the welfare system (which defines ‘poverty’), and the family (which defines ‘kinship’). . . .” Left-wing racists, like the editors of Race Traitor, characterize the presence of whites on this continent as an unmitigated catastrophe for “peoples of color” and an offense to everything that is decent and humane. In the perspective of these race radicals, white America is the “Great Satan.” In academic cant, they replicate the poisonous message of the black racists of the Nation of Islam.
I once occupied the other side of the political divide, but my views on race have not changed over the years. I opposed racial preferences and double standards when segregationists supported them in the 1960s, and I oppose them now. I believed then that only a government neutral towards racial groups was compatible with a multi-ethnic democracy. I believe that today. Where my views have changed is in the appreciation I now have for America’s constitutional framework and its commitment to those ideals. America’s unique political culture was indeed created by white European males, primarily English and Christian. It should be obvious to anyone with even a modest historical understanding that these antecedents are not incidental to the fact that America and England led the world in abolishing slavery and in establishing the principles of ethnic and racial inclusion. Or that “people of color” are attempting to immigrate to our shores in large numbers in order to take advantage of the unparalleled opportunities and rights our society offers them, as theirs do not.
The creation of America by Protestant Christians within the framework of the British Empire has afforded greater privileges and protections to all minorities than any society extant. European-American culture is one that the citizens of this nation can take enormous pride in, precisely because its principles provide for the inclusion of cultures that are non-white, non-Christian and ethnically diverse. That is why America’s democratic and pluralistic framework remains an inspiration to people of all colors all over the world, from Tiananmen Square to Haiti and Havana. This was once the common self-understanding of all Americans and is still the understanding of those who have not been seduced by the worldview of the progressive left.
The left’s war against “whiteness” and America’s democratic culture is in many respects the Cold War come home. The agendas of contemporary leftists are updated versions of the ideas of the Marxist left that supported the Communist empire. The same radicals who launched the social and political eruptions of the 1960s have now become the politically correct faculties of American universities. With suitable cosmetic adjustments, the theories, texts and leaders of this left display a striking continuity with the radicalism of thirty and sixty years ago. Their goal remains the destruction of America’s national identity and, in particular, of the moral, political and economic institutions that are its social foundation.
In the heyday of Stalinism, the accusation of “class bias” was used by Communists to undermine and attack individuals and institutions with which they were at war. This accusation magically turned well-meaning citizens into “enemies of the people,” a phrase handed down through radical generations from the Jacobin Terror in revolutionary France through the Stalinist purges in Russia and the blood-soaked cultural revolutions of Chairman Mao. The identical strategy is alive and well today in the left’s self-righteous imputation of sexism, racism, and homophobia to anyone who dissents from its party line. Always weak in intellectual argument, the left habitually relies on accusation and defamation to promote its increasingly incoherent worldview.
It is not that no one else in politics uses such tactics; it is just that the left uses them so reflexively, so recklessly, and so effectively. In the battle over California’s Civil Rights Initiative, which outlawed racial preferences, the left’s opposition took the form of a scorched-earth strategy whose purpose was to strip its proponents of any shred of respectability. The chief spokesman for the anti-discrimination initiative, Ward Connerly, himself an African-American, was accused of anti-black racism, of wanting to be white, and of being a bedfellow of the Ku Klux Klan. The left invited former Klan member David Duke to California to forge the nonexistent connection, paying his expenses for the trip. During the Initiative campaign, NAACP and ACLU lawyers who debated its proponents relied almost exclusively on charges of racism and alarmist visions of a future in which African-Americans and women would be deprived of their rights. In their TV spots, the anti-Initiative groups actually featured hooded Klan figures burning crosses to stigmatize Initiative supporters. A tremulous voice-over by actress Candace Bergen linked Ward Connerly, California Governor Pete Wilson, and House Speaker Newt Gingrich with the KKK, claiming that women would lose all the rights they had won, and blacks would be thrown back to a time before the Civil Rights Acts if its proponents succeeded. They even suggested that maternity leaves for pregnant women would become illegal if the law was passed.
The years since the passage of the California Civil Rights Initiative have refuted every one of the left’s dire predictions. Women have not lost their rights, and blacks have not been thrown back to the segregationist era. Even the enrollment of blacks in California’s higher education institutions has not significantly dropped, although demagogues of the left—including President Clinton—have used a shortfall in black admissions at the very highest levels of the system (Berkeley and UCLA) to mislead the public into thinking that an overall decline in black enrollment has taken place. One year after the Initiative’s adoption, enrollment had significantly fallen at only six elite graduate, law, and medical school programs in a higher-education system that consisted of more than seventy-four programs total. Yet there have been no apologies or acknowledgments of these facts from Candace Bergen, the NAACP, the ACLU, People for the American Way, or the other groups responsible for the campaign against the Civil Rights Initiative, or for the inflammatory rhetoric and public fear-mongering that accompanied it.
When an article of mine on racial issues was published in Salon magazine, it was attacked by award-winning African-American novelist Ishmael Reed, who suggested that I did not really care about what happened to blacks. Reed’s not-so-subtle imputation, that I was a racist, was typical of the way leftists approached any disagreement over policy that touched on race.22 In a futile attempt to forestall such attacks, I had cited the opinions of black conservatives in my article in support of my theses. The left’s response was to dismiss them as “inauthentic” blacks, “sambos,” “neocons” and “black comedians.” For leftists, the only good black was a black who parroted their party line.
A chapter in David Horowitz, Hating Whitey and Other Progressive Causes, Spence, 1999.
There is no real answer to such patronizing attitudes and nasty attacks. Nonetheless, I will repeat the response I made to Ishmael Reed. I have three black granddaughters for whom I want the absolute best that this life and this society have to offer. My extended black family, which is large and from humble origins in the Deep South, contains members who agree and who disagree with my views on these matters. But all of them understand that whatever I write on the subject of race derives from a profound desire for justice and opportunity for all. It springs from the hope that we can move towards a society where individuals, not groups, are what matter, and race is not a factor at all.
September