Introduction to 'Progressive Racism'
David Horowitz exposes the culture of leftist race hatred in Volume VI of the Black Book of the American Left.
http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/262662/introduction-progressive-racism-frontpagemagcomMay 2, 2016
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Below is David Horowitz’s introduction to his new book, “Progressive Racism," which is volume 6 of The Black Book of the American Left, a multi-volume collection of David Horowitz's conservative writings that will, when completed, be the most ambitious effort ever undertaken to define the Left and its agenda. (Order HERE.) We encourage our readers to visit BlackBookOfTheAmericanLeft.com – which features Horowitz’s introductions to Volumes 1-6 of this 10-volume series, along with their tables of contents, reviews and interviews with the author.
In August 2014 the shooting of a black criminal in Ferguson Missouri by a white police officer led to a series of riots lasting several months, and eventually inspired national protests making it the civil rights cause of the Obama era. The protesters’ indictment was summarized in a chant “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot,” which symbolized their claim that the nation’s police had declared open season on unarmed black citizens and were killing them for the crime of being black. During the public disturbances surrounding the Ferguson events the president and his chief law enforcement officer, Attorney General Eric Holder, exhibited active sympathy and support for the movement’s complaints.
When the facts were finally established by forensic evidence and grand jury testimony, and eventually by a separate Department of Justice investigation conducted by Holder himself, they refuted the movement’s central claim.[1] Forensics, video records and the testimony of five black eyewitnesses established that the alleged victim Michael Brown, was targeted for arrest not because he was black but because he had just committed a strong-armed robbery. He did not have his hands in the air and was not shot while surrendering but while attacking the arresting officer whose gun he attempted to wrestle from its holster.
In short, the actions of the crowds that burned the city of Ferguson and looted its community businesses even before the facts were in, and which continued their rampages even after the facts were established, were not those of a civil rights protest but of a lynch mob, unconcerned with the evidence, impatient with due process, and intent on ensuring that a severely injured officer who had been the victim of a criminal attack be indicted, tried, convicted and punished. Or else. How did the mob “know” that the officer was guilty? Because he was white. Mob leaders even demanded that the prosecutor – a white liberal Democrat – be removed from the case because his own father was the victim of a black criminal 50 years previously, and therefore he could not discharge his duties fairly.[2]
This racist thuggery would have been readily recognized as such if the lynch mob had been white. But it was composed mainly of African Americans and “civil rights” progressives, who were supported in their aggression by a media eager to embrace the baseless idea that unarmed black teens were regularly shot in the streets by white police officers who were protected by a “white supremacist” power structure. This, too, was contradicted by the facts. Shootings of black criminals by police have steadily been declining, while the number of whites shot by police officers nearly doubles that of blacks even though black males – six percent of the population - account for nearly forty percent of all violent crimes.[3] Although they constitute only 13% of the population more African Americans are murdered every year than whites.[4] a staggering majority – more than 90% - are murdered by other African Americans meaning that the police, rather than enemies as progressives have made them, are African Americans’ best friends and last line of defense against criminal violence.[5]
A second contested incident occurred soon after in New York when a black street criminal named Eric Garner died while resisting arrest after police were forced to apply a choke hold because of his large size. Garner’s words - “I can’t breathe”- joined “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” as a slogan of those pushing the narrative that America—and especially its police—were irredeemably racist. This led to a second slogan - “I can’t breathe” - which was meant to highlight the progressive mob’s view that the choke hold employed to cuff the 300 pound Garner had actually strangled him. So pervasive was the assumption of police guilt in the case that the slogan was featured on the warm-up jerseys of star athletes and became a national cause celebre. According to the activists, another unarmed black suspect had been murdered because he was black.
This time the charge of racism was particularly ludicrous since it was leveled against a police force half of whose officers were minorities.[6] The sergeant on the scene in charge of the fatal arrest was an African American woman, a fact studiously ignored by the media intent on pushing the narrative of police racism. Eventually the autopsy report showed that unknown to the police who arrested him Garner was suffering from multiple maladies including heart problems, asthma and morbid obesity. It was these conditions that caused the normal trauma of a resisted arrest to result in the collapse of Garner’s pulmonary capacity and his subsequent death in the ambulance later.
In other words, both accusations – of racism and strangulation – were false. But because of the pervasive influence of progressive prejudice in the culture at large, the lynch mobs were ultimately successful. To forestall the threat of future violence stemming from future “protests” The careers of the white officers involved in the fatal arrests were terminated. Ferguson officer Darren Wilson was forced to go into hiding to keep from being killed himself.
The furor of these events spurred much commentary as racial arsonists like Al Sharpton tried to make local tragedies into a national “crisis.” A fact lost in this shuffle is that progressive lynch mobs have been doing this work for decades. Three recent cases show the desperate effort of progressive vigilantes to keep alive the notion of America as a racist nation. One is the destruction of the career and fortune of TV cooking personality Paula Deen, a supporter of President Obama who had given more than a million dollars in charity to help inner city African Americans. In addition to being white, Deen’s offenses were a groundless discrimination lawsuit against her brother that was later dismissed, and her use of the forbidden word “bleep” in a remark made to her husband in private after being mugged by a black criminal during a bank robbery twenty-five years earlier. (She volunteered the remark in a deposition connected to the lawsuit.[7])
An even more celebrated case was the public lynching of three innocent Duke University LaCrosse players, the result of a nationwide hysteria whipped up over the rape claims of a drug-addicted black prostitute by Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson and other progressives, including 88 Duke professors who signed an ad condemning the students. Before the evidence exonerated them, they had to endure termination of their school careers, a year of public condemnation by national news networks, and onerous fees for their legal defense.[8] Finally, there was the rush to judgment and demand for punishment of George Zimmerman, falsely portrayed as a “white Hispanic” to make him racially culpable in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin.[9] As in the Ferguson case, the president and his attorney general led from behind as Sharpton and Jackson poured gasoline on the racial fire they had ignited.
What these events show is the way America’s political culture has been tragically warped by progressives through their rejection of the color blind standard established by the Constitution and once championed by the civil rights movement and its leader Martin Luther King. Progressives have been able to persuade an influential section of the country to believe that whites are guilty before the fact and blacks are innocent even when the facts show they are guilty. The racial morality play of “white supremacy” and black “oppression” provides an indispensable myth for advancing their political agendas, which is why it has proved so durable.
The fact that racial injustice is the most problematic aspect of the nation’s heritage is also the reason that it is the focus of the progressive assault on America and its social contract. For obvious reasons, progressives largely concentrate on one race—American blacks, or “African-Americans” as they have come to be known through at least five permutations of linguistic political correctness since World War II: “bleep,” “Negroes,” “blacks,” “persons of color” and—only then— “African-Americans.” The injustices of slavery and segregation and the historic sufferings of this community form an arguable basis for the progressive indictment, but only by systematically ignoring the historic gains—unprecedented and unparalleled—of this same community, which are the direct result of America’s tolerant and individual-centered social contract.
The introduction to this volume, “The Reds and the Blacks,” explains how the left’s melodrama of “oppression” and “social justice” is an extension of Marx’s discredited formulas of class oppression, which if successful will lead to the same results. Parts I and II that follow address the falling-away of the civil rights movement from the values championed by Martin Luther King, precisely because they are the values enshrined in the American founding and diametrically opposed to the socialist values of progressives.
“Memories in Memphis,” is an account of my visit to the National Civil Rights Museum housed in the motel where King was murdered. Inexplicably, the Civil Rights museum honors not only Dr. King but the anti-Semitic and anti-American racist Elijah Muhammad along with Malcolm X who derided King and the civil rights movement, claiming that racist America would never let them succeed. The museum provided a summary statement of the transformation of the civil rights movement after King’s death.
Until that moment the civil rights movement was a mass effort to integrate African-Americans into America’s multi-ethnic democracy. Less than a decade later it had become a movement to refashion racial grievances into a general assault on white people, on America and on the idea of a society in which people were judged by the content of their character and not the color of their skin. It was now color-coded instead of color-blind. The post-King civil rights movement was a creation of the political left and an assault on the most basic tenet of America’s social contract, enshrined in the 14th Amendment: the commitment to equal rights for all individuals, and thus to race-neutral standards and governmental practices. This commitment was anathema to progressives who were collectivists. They changed the course of the civil rights cause into a movement to transform the very meaning of the 14th Amendment and turn it into its opposite by institutionalizing racial preferences—the same kind of discriminatory practices that had characterized the era of segregation just passed. Destroying King’s legacy, progressives set out to recreate a race-conscious political culture in which blacks and a handful of designated minorities were singled out as groups to be racially privileged above all others, and particularly above whites who were made targets of exclusion, suspicion and disapprobation regardless of their actions or beliefs.
The third part of this volume recounts an effort I conducted in the spring of 2001 to oppose a campaign by the left to secure reparations for slavery 137 years after the fact. Reparations for slavery became a favored project of progressives because it made sure that the heritage of America’s “peculiar institution” remained alive and well a century and more after its abolition. In fact, reparations were a cause that had been first proposed in 1969, during the civil rights era - and was rejected by every major civil rights organization. At the time of the proposal there were no slaves alive to receive reparations, while the vast majority of Americans who would be forced to pay them were descended from immigrants who had arrived in America well after slavery was abolished. The clear goal of the radicals who launched the campaign was to indict America as a racist society, and sow the seeds of racial division and conflict. It also provided an ideological justification for a shakedown effort of the kind that had come to characterize the civil rights leadership of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton. Pay us or we’ll denounce you as racists.
Democratic congressman John Conyers was the author of the legislative bill supported by the reparations movement. During the controversy, a Republican majority in the House of Representatives prevented Conyers’s legislation from being passed out of the Judiciary Committee and sent to the House floor, a fact that the left seized on to insinuate that Republicans were racists. Yet when Democrats won control of the House in 2006 and Conyers became chair of the Judiciary Committee under a newly elected African-American president, the bill was not passed and the reparations issue, which had been infused with such ersatz moral urgency until then, faded quickly from view. Few episodes seem better designed to illustrate how race had become a political weapon for a movement driven more by its anti-American and anti-white animus than a desire to correct actual injustices.
Yet this animus is so integral to the progressive mind-set that they refuse to let the reparations idea die. In June 2014, the prestigious Atlantic Monthly published a lengthy and widely praised, “Case for Reparations” by Ta-Nehisi Coates. Coates’ argument shared the features characteristic of all reparations proponents - anti-white racism and anti-American fervor, along with a consistent failure to confront the complexity of the facts. Slavery existed in black Africa for a thousand years before a white European ever set foot on the continent. The African slaves who were shipped to the western hemisphere were enslaved in the first place by black Africans and then sold to European traders. At the time of the Atlantic slave trade, slavery had existed in all societies and among all ethnicities for 3,000 years and was never regarded as immoral until white Christians declared it so in the late 18th Century, and then launched the anti-slavery movement.
In 1787 a new nation was established on the American continent formally dedicating itself to the proposition that all men were created equal. In a little over a generation, Americans abolished slavery – an institution that still exists in Africa today. There were not 250 years of American slavery as Coates and others falsely maintain but 76 - from the adoption of the Constitution in 1787 until the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863. To enforce that Proclamation and end slavery three hundred and fifty thousand mostly (but not exclusively) white Americans sacrificed their lives in a war bloodier than all America’s wars since.
Why should the government that led the world in liberating slaves be punished more than a hundred years later, and when all slaves and slave owners are dead? Coates attempts to answer the question by devoting the bulk of his essay to the plight of inner city black communities. In his presentation, segregation and discriminatory housing laws – legacies of slavery’s racist attitudes - form the moral grounds for a current reparations claim. the remarkable rise of the black middle class, virtually non-existent in 1940, but which now encompasses half of all African Americans.[10] This fact alone nullifies his argument that slavery and segregation – both now long past -- are chiefly responsible for black poverty. Like other reparations advocates, Coates contemptuously dismisses the notion that the decline of the black family and pathologies associated with welfare dependency and absent fathers might lie at the root of the problem. Like them he also fails to acknowledge the trillions of welfare dollars that have been devoted to ameliorating black poverty and failed, or to explain why reparations trillions would lead to a different result.
Finally this volume examines the way progressive attacks on a chimerical “white supremacy” have been destructive for all citizens. The principal target of this racism, as already noted, is the idea of equal treatment for all individuals under the law, an idea that progressives seek to replace with group identities and group privileges based on race and gender. The idea of an equality of individuals without regard to race, ethnicity or gender, on the other hand, is the very idea that informs the American identity, and unites its diverse communities into a single nation.
There will always be racists and bigots. Only utopians will fail to understand this and seek to deploy the coercive powers of the state to make everyone believe as they do. By contrast, people connected to the realities of this world recognize that America is the most tolerant of societies. Americans’ cultural acceptance of racial, ethnic and gender minorities is virtually without parallel in human history. Interracial marriage, once the strongest racist taboo is now hardly noticed, whether among ordinary Americans or cultural celebrities; large American cities – Detroit, Philadelphia and Atlanta – are run by African American administrations and an African American has been twice elected to the White House. In their battles with “white supremacy,” progressives cling to a past that is already remote. They have become the true reactionaries of our time, and it is hardly surprising that they are its new racists as well.
Notes:
[1]
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/wp/2015/03/19/hands-up-dont-shoot-did-not-happen-in-ferguson/[2]
http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2014/08/26/3474838/why-civil-rights-groups-are-calling-for-the-ferguson-prosecutor-to-step-down/ ;
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/background-of-prosecutor-in-ferguson-case-has-some-suspicious-of-bias/[3]
http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/ph98.pdf; http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/ard0309st.pdf; http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2013/crime-in-the-u.s.-2013/tables/table-43[4] In 2013 there were 5,537 whites who were victims of homicide, compared to 6,261 blacks.
http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2013/crime-in-the-u.s.-2013/offenses-known-to-law-enforcement/expanded-homicide/expanded_homicide_data_table_1_murder_victims_by_race_and_sex_2013.xls[5] In 2013, 90% of black homicide victims were killed by other blacks.
http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2013/crime-in-the-u.s.-2013/offenses-known-to-law-enforcement/expanded-homicide/expanded_homicide_data_table_6_murder_race_and_sex_of_vicitm_by_race_and_sex_of_offender_2013.xls[6]
http://nypost.com/2014/09/08/nypd-is-as-diverse-as-new-york-city-itself/[7]
http://www.tmz.com/2013/06/19/paula-deen-n-word-racist-deposition-sexual-harassment-oyster-house/3/#comments-anchor [8] Stuart Taylor and K. C. Johnson, Until Proven Innocent: Political Correctness and the Shameful Injustices of the Duke Lacrosse Rape Case, 2008.
[9]
http://articles.latimes.com/2012/mar/27/opinion/la-oe-goldberg-trayvon-martin-race-20120327. It is my own opinion that Zimmerman was indeed culpable, but that doesn’t make the actions of the lynch mob any less deplorable. See Part IV, chapter 12 in this volume, “Second Thoughts About Trayvon.”
[10] Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom, America in Black and White, 1999.
Tags: Al Sharpton, David Horowitz, Progressives
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About David Horowitz
[For Frontpage editor Jaime Glazov's essay on David Horowitz's life and work, click here.]
David Horowitz was one of the founders of the New Left in the 1960s and an editor of its largest magazine, Ramparts. He is the author, with Peter Collier, of three best selling dynastic biographies: The Rockefellers: An American Dynasty (1976); The Kennedys: An American Dream (1984); and The Fords: An American Epic (1987). Looking back in anger at their days in the New Left, he and Collier wrote Destructive Generation (1989), a chronicle of their second thoughts about the 60s that has been compared to Whittaker Chambers’ Witness and other classic works documenting a break from totalitarianism. Horowitz examined this subject more closely in Radical Son (1996), a memoir tracing his odyssey from “red-diaper baby” to conservative activist that George Gilder described as “the first great autobiography of his generation.”
Horowitz is founder of the David Horowitz Freedom Center (formerly the Center for the Study of Popular Culture) and author of many books and pamphlets published over the last twenty years. Among them: Hating Whitey; Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left; The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America; and The End of Time.
Horowitz is now publishing The Black Book of the American Left, a multi volume collection of his conservative writings that will, when completed, be the most ambitious effort ever undertaken to define the Left and its agenda. Culture Wars, the fifth volume of this projected nine volume work, has just appeared. (For information on The Black Book of the American Left, click here.) His new book, Progressive Racism, will be published by Encounter Books in April, 2016.
