Hating Whitey and Other Progressive Causes
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HATING WHITEY
and Other Progressive Causes
DAVID HOROWITZ
Copyright © 1999 by David Horowitz
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.
To my stepson John J.
and my grandson Elvis Rishon,
and to April,
who has had the courage
to stand with me in these battles
Contents
Acknowledgements
INTRODUCTION Memories in Memphis
I
GET WHITEY
1 Racial Paranoia
2 Hate Crimes
3 A Rage to Kill
II
BLACK CAUCUS
4 Martin's Children
5 Amen Corner
6 Democrats and Blacks
7 Dealing with Racism
8 The Politics of Race
III
PANTHER REFLECTIONS
9 Black Murder, Inc.
10 Johnnie's Other O. J.
IV
PROGRESSIVE EDUCATION
11 Academic Politics
12 Postmodern Professors
13 The Loafing Class
14 Campus Brown Shirts
15 I, Rigoberta Menchu, Liar
16 Visit to a Small College
17 Calibrating the Culture Wars
V
LOOKING BACKWARD
18 Telling It Like It Wasn't
19 Two Goodbyes
20 Two Revolutions
21 Feminist Fibber
22 Professor Rorty's Left
23 Defending Christopher
24 A Proper Love of Country
VI
FOREIGN AFFAIRS
25 Misdemeanors or High Crimes?
26 A Question of Loyalties
27 The Manchurian President
EPILOGUE A Political Romance
Acknowledgements
MANY OF THE ESSAYS in this book appeared originally in the Internet magazine Salon, for which I have written a column every other Monday for more than two years. I am grateful to Salon's editor, David Talbot, who probably disagrees with most of the contents of this volume, for the opportunity he has provided me to reach an audience outside the conservative ghetto to which the rest of the liberal media has consigned my writing since I had second thoughts nearly twenty years ago. When I was still on the political left, David showed similar courage in de- fending Peter Collier and me when we came under attack in 1980 in the professional association Media Alliance for writing the truth about the prison radical George Jackson and his attorney, Fay Stender.* David's integrity and courage were again manifest in 1993 when, as editor of the "Ideas and Opinions" section of the San Francisco Chronicle, he reprinted the story, "Black Murder, Inc.," which appears in this volume. It was first published in Heterodoxy, the magazine Peter Collier and I edit. David was (and is to this day) the only member of the national media to show interest in this story, which concerns the most celebrated political organization of the New Left and its involvement in the murder of innocents.
My hands-on editors at Salon, Andrew Ross and David Weir, who also disagree with my current views, could not have been more supportive personally and professionally if they had been political soulmates. If more people were capable of an ecumenical spirit like theirs, our political discourse would be far more civilized and our civic order, more humane.
Finally, I wish to thank Benjamin Kepple and Cris Rapp of Heterodoxy, who provided me with editorial and research assistance. Their dedication and care has made this manuscript better and more accurate that it would otherwise have been.
* * *
* See "Requiern" in David Horowitz, Radical Son (New York: Free Press, 1998), 309ff., where the story of this article is told and the attacks on it described.
INTRODUCTION
Memories in Memphis
ON A RECENT TRIP TO THE SOUTH I found myself in Memphis, the city where Martin Luther King Jr. was struck down by an assassin's bullet just over thirty years ago. Memphis, I discovered, is home to a "National Civil Rights Museum," established by a local trust of African-Americans active in civil rights causes. Tucked out of the way on a side street, the museum is housed in the building that was once the Lorraine Motel, the very site where Dr. King was murdered. I decided to go.
Except for two white 1960s Cadillac convertibles parked under the motel balcony, the lot outside was empty when I arrived. It is part of the museum's plan to preserve the memories of that somber day in April three decades ago. The cars belonged to King and his entourage, and have been left as they were the morning he was killed. Above them, a wreath hangs from a balcony railing to mark the spot where Dr. King fell. Beyond is the room where he had slept the night before. It, too, has been preserved exactly as it was, the covers pulled back, the bed unmade, the breakfast tray laid out as though someone would be coming to pick it up.
Inside the building, the first floor of the motel has vanished completely, hollowed out for the museum's exhibits. The cavernous room has become a silent stage for the dramas of the movement King once led. These narratives are recounted in documents and photographs, some the length of wall frescoes, bearing images as inspirational today as then. In the center of the hall, the burned shell of a school bus recalls the freedom rides and the perils their passengers once endured. Scattered about are small television screens whose tapes recapture the moments and acts that once moved a nation. On one screen a crowd of well-dressed young men and women braves police dogs and water hoses vainly attempting to turn them back. It is a powerful tribute to a movement and leader 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, he turns a corner to a jarring, discordant sight. Two familiar faces stare out from a wall-size monument that seems strangely out of place — the faces of Malcolm X and Elijah Muhammad, leaders of the Nation of Islam. Aside from a portrait of King himself, there are no others 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, even bizarre. At the time of these struggles, Malcolm X was King's great antagonist in the black community, leading the resistance to the civil rights hope. The black Muslim publicly scorned King's March on Washingtort 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 for 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 X even denied King's racial authenticity, redefining the term "Negro," which King and his movement used to describe themselves, to mean "Uncle Tom."
King was unyielding before these attacks. To clarify his opposition to Malcolm X's separatist vision, 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 wþen 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.
Yet this very reconciliation — more a concession on Malcolm's part than King's — could argue for 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. Malcolm's understanding of the psychology of oppression, his courage in asserting the self-confidence and pride of black Americans might even make him worthy of inclusion in the temple of a man who was never a racist and whose movement he scorned.
But what of Elijah Muhammad? What is a racist and religious cultist doing in a monument to Martin Luther King? This is a truly perverse intrusion. The teachings of Elijah Muhammad mirror the white supremacist doctrines of the Southern racists whose rule King fought. According to Muhammad's teachings, white people were invented six thousand years ago by a mad scientist named Yacub in a failed experiment to dilute the blood of the original human beings, who were 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 fringe 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 portrait of the leader of the Hale-Bopp Comet cult in the Jefferson Memorial.
After I left the museum, it occurred to me that this image reflected a truth about the afterlife of the movement King created, the moral legacy of which was in large part squandered by those who inherited it after his death. The moral decline of the civil rights leadership is reflected in many episodes of the last quarter century: the embrace of racist demagogues like Louis Farrakhan and Al Sharpton, as well as indefensible causes like those of Tawana Brawley, O. J. Simpson, the Los Angeles riot, and the Million Man March on Washington, organized by the Nation of Islam and cynically designed to appropriate the moral mantle of King's historic event.
The impact of such episodes was compounded by the silence of black civil rights leaders over racial outrages committed by African-Americans — 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 race riot, the lynching of a Hasidic Jew by a black mob in Crown Heights, and a black jury's acquittal of his murderer. The failure of current civil rights leaders like Jesse Jackson, Kwesi Mfume, and Julian Bond to condemn black racists and black outrages committed against other ethnic communities has been striking in its contrast to the demands these same leaders make on the consciences of whites, not to mention the moral example set by King when he dissociated his movement from the racist preachings of Malcolm X.
This moral abdication of black civil rights leaders is integrally related to, if not fully explained by, their close association with a radical left whose anti-white hatred is a by-product of its antiAmericamsm. The attitudes of this left toward blacks are so patronizing that one disillusioned activist was inspired to write a book about them entitled Liberal Racism.* 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. Harvard's prestigious W.E.B. DuBois African-American Studies Institute, for example, provided an academic platform for lecturer Noel Ignatiev to launch "Whiteness Studies," an academic field promoting the idea that "whiteness" is a "social construct" that is oppressive and must be "abolished." 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 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 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." "Whiteness," in this view, is a category imposed on American society by its ruling class to organize the social order into a system of marxist-type oppression.† Consequently, "the key to solving the social problems of our age is to abolish the white race." This new racism expresses itself in slogans lifted right out of the radical 1960s. 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 in calling for a John Brown-style insurrection that would trigger a second American civil war and destroy the symbolic (and oppressive) order of whiteness.
Such language is incendiary and fuels a widespread denigration of Americans — including Jews, Arabs, Central Europeans, Mediterranean Europeans, East Indians, Armenians — who are multi-ethnic and often dark-skinned, but who for official purposes (and under pressure from civil rights groups like the NAACP) 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 education of tomorrow's elites.
An anthology of the first five years of Race Traitor, for example, has been published by a prestigious, academic-oriented publishing house (Routledge) and was the winner of the 1997 American Book Award. Its jacket features praise by a prestigious Harvard professor, Cornel West, who writes: "Race Traitor is the most visionary, courageous journal in America." West's coziness with the racist Louis Farrakhan (he was a speaker at the Million Man March) has done nothing to tarnish his own academic reputation, his popularity with students, or his standing in the "civil rights" community. Afrocentrist racists like Leonard Jeffries, the late John Henrik Clarke, Derrick Bell, and Tony Martin-to name just a few — have also been integral parts of the academic culture for decades, often running entire academic 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 did not reflect prevailing leftist views.
In recent decades, anti-white racism has, in fact, become a common currency of the "progressive" intelligentsia. Examples range from communist Professor Angela Davis, whose ideological rants are routinely laced with racial animosity (and who recently told an audience of undergraduates at Michigan 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, in order to imply that white America acted as the KKK in pursuing Simpson for the murder 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 "scholarship" whose sole purpose is to incite hatred against white America, against "Euro-American" culture, and against American institutions in general. According to the editors of Race Traitor, "just as the capitahst 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 (whic
h defines 'kinship')."‡ The editors of Race Traitor characterize the presence of whites on this continent as an umnitigated.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.
Some of the manifestations of this anti-white racism are explored in this volume, the purpose of which is to open a frank discussion of a subject that is almost never directly discussed. Almost all the chapters first appeared as columns in the Internet magazine Salon, a left-of-center publication with sufficient editorial independence to include a dissident writer like myself. This, in itself, may be a hopeful sign of what may be possible if a dialogue is encouraged. The tolerance of Salon's editors for the views in this book should not be surprising, since they are the same views once advanced by the civil rights movement King led. Unfortunately, if experience is any judge, that will not make their author immune from charges of racism.
As those familiar with my autobiography, Radical Son, know, I once occupied the other side of the political divide. My views on race, however, have remained entirely consistent with my previous commitments and beliefs. I opposed racial preferences in the 1960s, and I oppose them now. Then, I believed that only government neutrality towards racial groups was compatible with the survival of a multi-ethnic society that is also democratic. I still believe that today.