In no other area has the culture of the sixties so debased the ideal of intellectual honesty as in the area of race. David’s new book, Hating Whitey and Other Progressive Causes, is the answer to the President’s commission on race. When the President says we need to have a dialog, David is the one truly engaging in that dialog. And just because David is there, the other side freaks and starts yelling racist epithets against him. Nobody can teach us as much about intellectual honesty and courage as David Horowitz.
~ IWF Director of Policy Barbara Ledeen
My book is about race and the double standard that exists in American life. We live in a country where part of the social contract is that it is wrong and unacceptable to be intolerant or to hate another ethnic group. Yet there is a license to hate white people in our culture, and, in fact, the hatred of whites is positively incited at our elite universities.
I got into trouble with these ideas when I wrote a piece for the Internet magazine Salon. As a result of that article, Jack White said that I was a racist in his column in Time magazine. Time actually ran the headline “A Real Live Bigot.” It is not pleasant to be called a racist by Time magazine, but that is why there is silence on this issue. People are afraid to speak out because they don’t want to be called racists. My book is an attempt to speak out, an attempt to provoke a new level of dialog.
We have come to a point where if there are too many blacks in jail, the obvious problem — that too many blacks are committing crimes — is not even addressed. It’s white racism that accounts for the excessive numbers of blacks in jail. If black kids are not passing tests and are not up to grade level, instead of looking to their parents and their community for a lack of support, or to the schools that are crumbling, we hear that the cause is institutional racism. “Blame whitey” is the idea. Every pathology in the inner-city black communities is blamed on white people.
So, the first thing you can see about this is the crippling message that is being sent to the black community: You have no power to affect your own destiny since white people control everything.
The Left has a vested interest in there being oppressors and oppressed people, and one of the things that really upset Jack White was my statement — which I frequently make when I’m on campuses — that nobody is oppressed in America, except maybe children by their abusive parents.
Oppression is a group phenomenon, and there’s no way out if you’re oppressed. It’s different from bigotry, which is an individual matter.
There are millions of refugees from oppressive regimes; that’s why we can call them oppressive. They leave their country if they have the freedom to leave. But there’s nobody leaving America. There’s no exodus from America by black people or brown people. Quite the contrary. They all want to come here. If America is a racist, oppressive country, how come the Haitians want to come here? Why do they want to risk their lives to get to America? To be oppressed? No, once you get the ideological blinders off, and you just think about it for two seconds, you know why they come: They have more rights and more opportunities in America as black Haitians than they do in black-run Haiti.
Jack White thought that I was saying that blacks should leave America, or that’s what he wrote. And Julian Bond, the head of the NAACP, also accused me of being a racist. He said I was a sixties turncoat; but he’s the turncoat. I’m still where I was in the sixties on the issue of racism. I still believe in Martin Luther King’s vision: one standard for everybody. It’s the NAACP and Julian Bond who have done the 180-degree turn.
I was speaking at Bates College and a young woman asked me, “What about the hierarchies?” Perhaps you’re not aware that your children are being taught in every university in America that there are hierarchies of race, class, and gender that oppress designated oppressed groups? So, I said to this young woman, where do you put Oprah Winfrey in your hierarchies? She was the daughter of a Mississippi sharecropper, and she was abused as a child. There was no affirmative action committee telling the television industry that we needed, for diversity purposes, a black female to do a talk show. She clawed her way up, and by her intelligence and her ability, she basically drove Phil Donahue out of the business.
So you can just compact the zillion words of text of all the women’s studies courses in America and all of the African-American studies and put them to some better use, because the entire edifice of leftist theory on race and gender is completely demolished by the example of Oprah Winfrey. It’s very hard to make a leftist see it, but that is the reality.
David Horowitz, author, editor, and president of the Center for the Study of Popular Culture, spoke to the IWF in November and discussed his new book, Hating Whitey (Spence Publishing).