future in which African-Americans and women would be deprived of their rights. In their TV spots, the anti-Initiative groups actually featured hooded Klan figures burning crosses to stigmatize Initiative supporters. A tremulous voice-over by actress Candace Bergen linked Ward Connerly, California Governor Pete Wilson, and House Speaker Newt Gingrich with the KKK, claiming that women would lose all the rights they had won, and blacks would be thrown back to a time before the Civil Rights Acts if its proponents succeeded. They even suggested that maternity leaves for pregnant women would become illegal if the law was passed.
The years since the passage of the California Civil Rights Initiative have refuted every one of the left’s dire predictions. Women have not lost their rights, and blacks have not been thrown back to the segregationist era. Even the enrollment of blacks in California’s higher education institutions has not significantly dropped, although demagogues of the left—including President Clinton—have used a shortfall in black admissions at the very highest levels of the system (Berkeley and UCLA) to mislead the public into thinking that an overall decline in black enrollment has taken place. One year after the Initiative’s adoption, enrollment had significantly fallen at only six elite graduate, law, and medical school programs in a higher-education system that consisted of more than seventy-four programs total. Yet there have been no apologies or acknowledgments of these facts from Candace Bergen, the NAACP, the ACLU, People for the American Way, or the other groups responsible for the campaign against the Civil Rights Initiative, or for the inflammatory rhetoric and public fear-mongering that accompanied it.
When an article of mine on racial issues was published in Salon magazine, it was attacked by award-winning African-American novelist Ishmael Reed, who suggested that I did not really care about what happened to blacks. Reed’s not-so-subtle imputation, that I was a racist, was typical of the way leftists approached any disagreement over policy that touched on race.22 In a futile attempt to forestall such attacks, I had cited the opinions of black conservatives in my article in support of my theses. The left’s response was to dismiss them as “inauthentic” blacks, “sambos,” “neocons” and “black comedians.” For leftists, the only good black was a black who parroted their party line.
A chapter in David Horowitz, Hating Whitey and Other Progressive Causes, Spence, 1999.
There is no real answer to such patronizing attitudes and nasty attacks. Nonetheless, I will repeat the response I made to Ishmael Reed. I have three black granddaughters for whom I want the absolute best that this life and this society have to offer. My extended black family, which is large and from humble origins in the Deep South, contains members who agree and who disagree with my views on these matters. But all of them understand that whatever I write on the subject of race derives from a profound desire for justice and opportunity for all. It springs from the hope that we can move towards a society where individuals, not groups, are what matter, and race is not a factor at all.
September 30, 1999, http://archive.frontpagemag.com/Printable.aspx?ArtId=24316. This was also the introductory chapter to David Horowitz, Hating Whitey and Other Progressive Causes, Spence, 1999.
1 Jim Sleeper, Liberal Racism, Viking, 1997.
2 A chapter in David Horowitz, Hating Whitey and Other Progressive Causes, Spence, 1999.
Clarence Page’s Race Problem, and Mine
Clarence Page is a well-known television African-American commentator, Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for the Chicago Tribune, and author of the recent book Showing My Color. An adolescent in the civil rights era, Page could be taken as a symbol of that era’s success. Unlike many of his radical peers, he has forcefully dissociated himself from the separatists of the Million Man March and is not ashamed of expressing hope in the American dream. Yet, in Showing My Color, Page has written what amounts to an apologia for those same bitter and unappreciative voices that call into question the legacy of Martin Luther King. Consequently his book is also a prime example of the problematic racial attitudes of black intellectuals in the post-King era.
Page takes the title of his book from a parental admonition frequently heard during his youth: “Don’t be showin’ yo’ color.” Showing your color, he explains, “could mean acting out or showing anger in a loud and uncivilized way.” More particularly, to him it means playing to stereotype. In other words, “showing your color” really means showing your culture—a critical point that escapes him. The title, he explains, “emerged from my fuming discontent with the current fashions of racial denial, steadfast repudiations of the difference race continues to make in American life.” Having failed to make the distinction between cultural differences and color differences, Page goes on to defend affirmative action racial preferences and attack the “‘color-blind’ approach to civil rights law,” lamenting the way the words of Martin Luther King have been “perverted” by supporters of the “color-blind” view.
Page’s book begins inauspiciously with a personal anecdote with which he intends to establish that racism is, indeed, a “rude factor” in his life and—by extension—the lives of all black Americans. Unfortunately for his case, the anecdote is fifty years old, involving a trip to segregated Alabama in the fifties, where he encountered water fountains marked “colored” and “white.” It does not occur to him that outrage over an event that took place nearly half a century ago has exhausted its shelf life. Page does acknowledge that such moments are probably behind us, but goes on to argue—as the post-King civil rights activists are prone to do—that a subtle and invisible set of power relationships continues to produce the same results: “Social, historical, traditional and institutional habits of mind that are deeply imbedded in the national psyche . . . work as active agents to impede equal opportunity for blacks.”
The politically correct term for these invisible factors is “institutional racism,” which Page explains this way: “[Racism] is not just an internalized belief or attitude. It is also an externalized public practice, a power relationship that continually dominates, encourages, and reproduces the very conditions that make it so useful and profitable.” This mystical formulation, without any concrete evidence to the real world, is not surprisingly phrased in a language redolent with Marxist clichés. On the other hand, Page is also capable of a more complex understanding of the dilemmas we face. He may think of himself as a “progressive,” but there is a conservative inside him struggling to get out: “Conservatism resonates familiarly with me,” he writes in a chapter called A Farewell to Alms, “as I think it does with most black Americans.”
“We vote liberal, for liberalism has helped us make our greatest gains. But in other areas, we swing conservative. We want to believe that hard work will be rewarded. . . . We want to believe in the promise of America.” It takes courage for Page to defend his conservative instincts, especially in view of the intimidating pressures within the black community to make public figures like him observe racial solidarity on crucial political issues. Page does not hesitate to point out that the anti-Semitic ravings of Louis Farrakhan and other spokesmen for the Nation of Islam created the public climate in which a Yankel Rosenbaum could be lynched in Crown Heights a few years ago, and in which his killer could be acquitted by a jury of blacks. Yet Page remains a political liberal and Democrat, he claims, because of Republicans’ alleged assumption that “racism is no longer a problem” and that “government programs and agencies must be trimmed, even when those programs and agencies offer the last slender thread of protection the grandchildren of America’s black slaves have against further slides back into oppression.”
