No Shades of Gray

Hating Whitey, And Other Progressive Causes, by David Horowitz, Spence, 300 pp., $ 24.95

Last August, David Horowitz wrote a column for the online magazine Salon that attacked the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s decision to sue gun manufacturers. The basis for the suit was the disparate impact of gun violence on black males fifteen to twenty-four years old, who are roughly five times more likely to be shot than white males in the same age cohort. “Am I alone in thinking this a pathetic, absurd, and almost hilarious demonstration of political desperation by the civil rights establishment?” Horowitz wrote. “What next? Will Irish Americans sue whiskey distillers, or Jews the gas company?” And he suggested the NAACP is living in a fantasy world “in which African Americans are no longer responsible for anything negative they do, even to themselves.”

Jack White, a black columnist for Time, took umbrage. He called Horowitz, a former radical leftist, one-time editor of Ramparts, and ex-pal of the Black Panthers, a “real live bigot.” White said he’d been mellowing on racial matters, but the Horowitz piece made him feel militant again. “It reminded me that blatant bigotry is alive and well, even on one of the Internet’s otherwise most humane and sophisticated websites.”

Horowitz, in turn, did not take White’s fusillade lying down. He responded with a long, passionate letter to Time editor Walter Isaacson calling White’s charge “a hateful racial lie.” He spelled out his record of working for equal rights for blacks, insisting he’d “never written or spoken a word — or committed an act — that any reasonable person could call ‘bigoted.'” Then, he concluded by asking Time to run his entire letter as an article and accompany it with an apology for making him a “victim of racial injustice.” Time didn’t, but Horowitz got a measure of justice anyway. Months later, the magazine reviewed Hating Whitey, likening Horowitz to Whittaker Chambers and his detractors to Alger Hiss. “For a cautionary perspective in an argument like this, it pays to remember that Hiss was guilty and Chambers was right,” Time reviewer Lance Morrow wrote.

This episode reveals a lot about Horowitz and a bit about Hating Whitey, too. Horowitz, who now runs the Los Angeles-based Center for the Study of Popular Culture and publishes Heterodoxy magazine, is willing to go after liberal and leftist targets — the civil rights establishment, college and university faculties, Communist sympathizers, to name three — that other conservatives just as soon ignore. And it is this fearlessness, plus a unique understanding of how the organized Left operates, that has made him an enormously important figure among American conservatives. These two qualities shine through in Hating Whitey, a collection of essays and Salon columns.

No one picks apart the pretensions of the civil rights crowd quite the way Horowitz does. He lauds the first civil rights era, led by Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., and pillories the second, led by Jesse Jackson, Kweisi Mfume, and Al Sharpton. He accuses Sharpton in particular of “moral abdication,” notably for refusing to condemn anti-white racism while blaming whites for every pathology and problem that confronts America’s blacks. Post-King, black leaders have concocted a vision of America that is not only wrong but also paranoid, he writes. The result is “a squandering of the moral legacy” of the first civil rights era and its goal of expunging racial discrimination, and its replacement by a new civil rights agenda with a vast system of racial preferences as its top priority.

Horowitz is merciless in skewering the “radical myth” of “institutional racism,” which holds that even when actual acts of racial bias are absent, “any statistical disparity of black representation anywhere in the culture is proof of white malevolence and of the necessity of racial preference remedies.” In other words, racism exists, oppressing blacks, even when it doesn’t. But Asian-Americans, many of them less culturally attuned to America than blacks and speaking a foreign language, prove the falsity of this, Horowitz says. They face the same structural obstacles as blacks and manage to succeed economically and academically.

“The belief in the power of ‘institutional racism’ allows civil rights leaders to denounce America as a ‘racist’ society, when it is the only society on earth — black, white, brown, or yellow — whose defining public creed is anti-racist, a society to which black refugees from black-ruled nations regularly flee in search of refuge and freedom,” Horowitz writes. And “institutional racism” is also a dodge, giving black leaders an excuse to “avoid the encounter with real problems within their own communities, which are neither caused by whites nor soluble by the actions of whites, but which cry out for attention.”

Horowitz is every bit as rigorous and ruthless in savaging leftist academics and radicals with Communist pasts who now pose as social thinkers (Betty Friedan, for example). Horowitz’s parents were Communist party members, and he remembers his own leftist days painfully. Decoded Soviet communications have revealed, he says, that “there were spies among us, and cold-blooded agents for a tainted cause. And all of us, it could no longer be denied, had treason in our hearts in the name of a future that would never come.”

I’m not sure if Horowitz has ever met Randall Robinson. The Debt, Robinson’s pitch for reparations for American blacks and for the entire continent of Africa, was published shortly after Hating Whitey appeared. In another context, however, Horowitz observes that “if you have to invoke a distant past to justify a present grievance, the case for the grievance is already undermined.” And this — blaming nearly all the current ills of the black community on slavery — is exactly what Robinson does. “Solutions to our racial problems are possible, but only if our society can be brought to face up to the massive crime of slavery and all that it has wrought,” he writes.

He’s not talking about a one-shot deal either, but a payback extending over several generations. “Let there be no doubt, it will require great resources and decades of national fortitude to resolve economic and social disparities so long in the making,” Robinson writes. The case he makes is a simple one: Slavery was the worst human rights abuse in history, and blacks are still being victimized by it. He cites precedents for reparations, including Germany’s assigned debt to the Allies after World War I, Germany’s payments to individual Jews and Israel after World War II, and the U.S. government’s compensation of Japanese-Americans quarantined during World War II. But reparations a century and half later? He’s weak on this point.

And he’s weaker still on reparations for Africa. Robinson is founder and president of an organization called TransAfrica, which successfully pushed for sanctions against white-ruled South Africa. But he is precisely the type of American black leader singled out for criticism by the black writer Keith Richburg of the Washington Post in his scintillating book on Africa, Out of America. Like Jesse Jackson and others, Robinson rarely has a critical word for the dictators and kleptocrats who rule many African nations. Nor does Robinson mention the complicity of black Africans in the slave trade. He claims that all of Africa’s problems stem from one source: white colonialism. It’s an argument David Horowitz wouldn’t find convincing, and I doubt if many others do either.

Fred Barnes is executive editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.