Progressive Racism. David Horowitz
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This was also the introductory chapter to David Horowitz, Hating Whitey and Other Progressive Causes, Spence, 1999.
1 Jim Sleeper, Liberal Racism, Viking, 1997.
2 A chapter in David Horowitz, Hating Whitey and Other Progressive Causes, Spence, 1999.
Clarence Page’s Race Problem, and Mine
Clarence Page is a well-known television African-American commentator, Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for the Chicago Tribune, and author of the recent book Showing My Color. An adolescent in the civil rights era, Page could be taken as a symbol of that era’s success. Unlike many of his radical peers, he has forcefully dissociated himself from the separatists of the Million Man March and is not ashamed of expressing hope in the American dream. Yet, in Showing My Color, Page has written what amounts to an apologia for those same bitter and unappreciative voices that call into question the legacy of Martin Luther King. Consequently his book is also a prime example of the problematic racial attitudes of black intellectuals in the post-King era.
Page takes the title of his book from a parental admonition frequently heard during his youth: “Don’t be showin’ yo’ color.” Showing your color, he explains, “could mean acting out or showing anger in a loud and uncivilized way.” More particularly, to him it means playing to stereotype. In other words, “showing your color” really means showing your culture—a critical point that escapes him. The title, he explains, “emerged from my fuming discontent with the current fashions of racial denial, steadfast repudiations of the difference race continues to make in American life.” Having failed to make the distinction between cultural differences and color differences, Page goes on to defend affirmative action racial preferences and attack the “‘color-blind’ approach to civil rights law,” lamenting the way the words of Martin Luther King have been “perverted” by supporters of the “color-blind” view.
Page’s book begins inauspiciously with a personal anecdote with which he intends to establish that racism is, indeed, a “rude factor” in his life and—by extension—the lives of all black Americans. Unfortunately for his case, the anecdote is fifty years old, involving a trip to segregated Alabama in the fifties, where he encountered water fountains marked “colored” and “white.” It does not occur to him that outrage over an event that took place nearly half a century ago has exhausted its shelf life. Page does acknowledge that such moments are probably behind us, but goes on to argue—as the post-King civil rights activists are prone to do—that a subtle and invisible set of power relationships continues to produce the same results: “Social, historical, traditional and institutional habits of mind that are deeply imbedded in the national psyche . . . work as active agents to impede equal opportunity for blacks.”
The politically correct term for these invisible factors is “institutional racism,” which Page explains this way: “[Racism] is not just an internalized belief or attitude. It is also an externalized public practice, a power relationship that continually dominates, encourages, and reproduces the very conditions that make it so useful and profitable.” This mystical formulation, without any concrete evidence to the real world, is not surprisingly phrased in a language redolent with Marxist clichés. On the other hand, Page is also capable of a more complex understanding of the dilemmas we face. He may think of himself as a “progressive,” but there is a conservative inside him struggling to get out: “Conservatism resonates familiarly with me,” he writes in a chapter called A Farewell to Alms, “as I think it does with most black Americans.”
“We vote liberal, for liberalism has helped us make our greatest gains. But in other areas, we swing conservative. We want to believe that hard work will be rewarded. . . . We want to believe in the promise of America.” It takes courage for Page to defend his conservative instincts, especially in view of the intimidating pressures within the black community to make public figures like him observe racial solidarity on crucial political issues. Page does not hesitate to point out that the anti-Semitic ravings of Louis Farrakhan and other spokesmen for the Nation of Islam created the public climate in which a Yankel Rosenbaum could be lynched in Crown Heights a few years ago, and in which his killer could be acquitted by a jury of blacks. Yet Page remains a political liberal and Democrat, he claims, because of Republicans’ alleged assumption that “racism is no longer a problem” and that “government programs and agencies must be trimmed, even when those programs and agencies offer the last slender thread of protection the grandchildren of America’s black slaves have against further slides back into oppression.”
To support this dire view, Page points to conservative opposition to minimum-wage laws, affirmative action employment policies, and welfare aid to mothers with dependent children. But a deeper cultural dimension to Page’s differences with Republicans is evoked by sentences like this: “Klan membership dropped sharply in the early 1980s, according to researchers for the Anti-Defamation League and other Klan-watching groups, as many found a new, satisfying voice and vehicle in Republican Party politics. Enter David Duke.” But this is almost as far-fetched as recalling the segregated water fountains of a distant past. Duke’s influence, unlike Farrakhan’s, doesn’t reach outside Louisiana or into the chambers of Congress. Duke has been publicly condemned by the Republican Party leadership, including three former Republican presidents, something Page neglects to mention.
This lapse into partisan race-baiting prompts me to show my own color. I am a Jewish Republican, who nearly fifty years ago marched in support of Harry Truman’s civil rights legislation and have been active in civil rights struggles ever since. Moreover, I can produce a personal anecdote of anti-Semitism that, unlike Page’s encounter with segregated facilities as a child, is actually current. My fiancée is a non-Jewish woman who has been confronted by several friends who have said to her, “How can you marry a Jew?” Prejudice exists, but there is no need to make more of it than it deserves.
The level of Jew-hatred in America actually is higher today than it has been in my entire lifetime, thanks not only to the poisonous rants of Louis Farrakhan but also to the collusion of large sections of the black intelligentsia in legitimizing his viewpoint for African-Americans. It is black anti-Semites who have legitimated public anti-Semitism in a way that no other group in America could. Nor does it seem that Jews or other minorities can feel as protected today by the American mainstream as blacks. When Marlon Brando launched an attack on Hollywood Jews on a Larry King show and went on to talk about “kikes,” “chinks,” and “niggers,” it was only the “N-word” that got bleeped by the CNN censors. “Institutional racism,” if we want to grant that mythical construct a modicum of reality, can cut more than one way.
Anti-Semitism has real-world consequences for Jews, just as surely as racism does for blacks. For example, a Jew knows not to seek a career in the auto business without taking into account the fact that Jews are few and far between in the auto industry and almost invisible at executive levels. I have stood in the living rooms of Grosse Pointe mansions and felt the disdain caused by my ethnicity. But this does not lead me or my fellow Jews to call for government-enforced preferences for Jews or to seek the source of this prejudice in the institutional heart of the nation.
For a voting liberal, Page has an unusually broad familiarity with conservative writers, and his readings are mostly respectful. It is not surprising, therefore, that his defense of affirmative action is often shrewd, even if his arguments remain unconvincing. Like other defenders of an indefensible policy, Page begins by denying that affirmative action is what it is: “Despite myths to the contrary, affirmative action is not intended to promote people who are not qualified. It is intended to widen the criteria for those who are chosen out of the pool of the qualified.” Unfortunately for this argument, there are a plethora of examples that prove just the opposite.
Journalist Roger Wilkins was made University Professor of History at George Mason University despite the fact that he had no qualifications as a historian, never having written a scholarly monograph. Wilkins was chosen, it happens, over my friend