and eventually destroy us. Keep us from the charity of those who would chain us to their benevolence with lifetime handouts. Spare us the compassion of saviors who secretly despise us, who think that we cannot compete on our merits or live up to the moral standards they expect of themselves.
This is the creed of true equality. It has just taken me a long time to understand that.
March 31, 1997, http://www.salon.com/1997/03/31/horowitz970331/ http://www.newsrealblog.com/2011/01/21/an-old-black-washer-woman-shall-lead-them/print/.
1 David Horowitz, Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey, Free Press, 1997.
Alternative to Affirmative Action
President Clinton’s much-awaited statement on race has come and gone and, as usual with this president, no one on either side of the argument is convinced that anything was said at all. Perhaps this reveals something about the general state of the nation—our inability to speak clearly, unambiguously and directly about the issue of race.
The president chose a University of California campus in San Diego as the site for his pronouncement in order to focus attention on California’s ban on racial preferences and what he described as the drop in enrollment rates resulting from that ban. According to university officials, African-American admissions to UC’s Boalt Hall law school, one of the most prestigious in the nation, dropped by 85 percent as a result of the new policy. But African-American enrollment throughout the whole University of California system actually increased. What the president chose not to discuss was the way in which the results at an elite institution like Boalt completely undermine the defenders of the affirmative action/racial preference policies that are now—thanks to Proposition 209—illegal in California. During the arguments over the California Civil Rights Initiative, opponents had claimed that race was only one of many factors and an insignificant one at best in awarding affirmative action slots at the university. Now it is clear that affirmative action is a system of racial preferences and racial discrimination and nothing more.
The president calls for a conversation about race, but what he really wants is a conversation about racism, and about white racism exclusively. His response to California’s rejection of racial preferences is that we must not “re-segregate” higher education. As though re-segregation was not already an accomplished agenda of the left; as though black separatists and their liberal allies were not the leaders of the movement; as though there were not separate black dorms and black graduations sanctioned by progressive university administrators; as though there were not special orientations for incoming black freshmen and expensive invitations to black racists like Khalid Muhammad, Louis Farrakhan, Kwame Ture, Professor Griff, Sister Souljah, Leonard Jeffries, Tony Martin, Frances Welsing, etc., etc., to speak before black student unions and Pan African student associations and incite racial hatred against whites.
Lacking any interest in addressing the real problems of racial division in America, what the president did was to offer a challenge to those of us who remain faithful to the vision of the civil rights movement and reject government discrimination. To those who oppose affirmative action, the president said, “I’ll ask you to come up with an alternative. I would embrace it if I could find a better way.”
There is such an alternative. It’s called study. Study hard. If you want to get into an elite law school, that’s what you need to do. The alternative to rigging the standards, Mr. President, is to teach one’s children the value of an education in the first place. It is to stick around after conception to help children enter a difficult and demanding world. It is to give up the blame game and look at your own responsibility for where you are. It is to tell your children that getting educated is not “thinking white.” It’s thinking.
How is it helpful to African-Americans to tell them that it is not their failure when they do not meet standards that others do, but the fault of white racists who want to keep them down? This is a lie and everybody knows it. African-Americans are failing because they are not prepared by their families and their culture to succeed. If race or poverty were real concerns of the University of California, its administrators would not be excluding Vietnamese and Cambodian children (who do meet the standards) in order to make room for African-American and Hispanic children (who do not).
It’s time for a president of the United States to stand up and be proud of the fact that in America minorities are no longer barred because of race from America’s best universities, or indeed from any American university. Racial handwringing by guilt-ridden whites does not help the disadvantaged. On the contrary, it is an obstacle to their progress. It contributes to what is now a massive denial of the problems that minority communities create for themselves. And by contributing to the delusion that others who have been successful control the destinies of those who are not, it takes from them the power to change their fate.
June 23, 1997, http://archive.frontpagemag.com/Printable.aspx?ArtId=24401; http://www.salon.com/1997/06/23/horowitz970623/.
Progressives Support Racial Divisions
A Clinton task force has unanimously recommended against adding the category “multiracial” to the government census forms which now list four official race categories: white, black, American Indian/Alaskan Native, and Asian/Pacific Islander. According to news reports on this development, “The recommendation marks a victory for traditional civil rights and ethnic advocacy groups, including the NAACP and the National Council of La Raza, which were pitted against the newer multiracial advocacy groups.” Welcome to the Alice-in-Wonderland world of America’s racial politics.
Begin anywhere: Asians (to pick only one of those official categories) are not a race. The National Council of La Raza (The Race) is an ethnic advocacy group, but neither the Hispanic nor the Latino ethnic constituency it claims to represent is really an ethnicity. They are language groups. Moreover, the terms Latino and Hispanic cover not only different but polarized ethnicities, nationalities and races (e.g., the Mexican Indians of Chiapas and their European-descended Hispanic oppressors). Finally, neither the NAACP nor La Raza can be said to be much concerned for civil rights these days, judging by their advocacy of racial and ethnic preferences and the zeal they have shown in opposing the civil rights claims of multiracial Americans.
The multiracial latecomers to the debate have discovered that there is no room for them at the civil rights table. Despite creating their own advocacy institutions modeled on what’s become of the civil rights struggle, including a march on Washington to protest their “under-representation,” they have come up virtually empty in their quest for a census box. There is not going to be a Tiger Woods band in the American rainbow, at least not this year; no designation for the one-quarter white, one-eighth black, one-quarter Thai, one-quarter Chinese, one-eighth Indian American. Of course, the administration liberals didn’t fail to throw a crumb in the direction of the multiracials: namely, the ability to check
