Progressive Racism. David Horowitz
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 off multiple boxes if they should so choose.
A spokesperson for the multiracial coalition named Susan Graham, president of a group called Project Race, welcomed this “victory” but insisted that her troops would continue to pursue the multiracial category: “As it is, my children cannot be multiracial children. My children can be ‘check-all-that-apply’ children and I do not consider that fair.”
It’s not really about fairness, Susan. It’s about a racial/ethnic spoils system, which is the sorry mess that civil rights advocacy has become in America since the death of Martin Luther King. The stakes here, of course, are not rights but entitlements: the set-asides, grants, voting district lines and other government (and now private) handouts that serve as payoffs to the racial/ethnic grievance-mongers. Otherwise, who could be against a multiracial census category, which if adopted would embody the celebrated American mosaic?
Actually, I would be against it. I say this not only as a veteran of the once venerable civil rights struggle, but as the grandfather of three beautiful granddaughters who would qualify for the box that will not appear on your next national census and thus would not qualify for the affirmative action perks, the special even-if-you-don’t-really-need-them scholarships, and the minority even-if-you-have-to-subcontract-them-to-someone-who-is-actually-qualified-t o-do-the-job contracts.
Of course, my granddaughters will be able to fill a preferred racial box anyway and qualify for all these perks if they just tick off the category which includes that part of their racial/ethnic chromosomes (in their case, black) that make the Clinton liberals and other social engineers of the new American apartheid feel good about themselves. I use the word “apartheid” advisedly, because apartheid in its origins was nothing more than an affirmative action program for the Boer minority, who were oppressed by the English.
The current multiracial census fiasco ought to set off alarm bells to the nation, that we are headed down a terribly wrong path. We have already become a race-conscious society in a way that would have been unthinkable just a generation ago, when the phrase “without regard to race, color or creed” was still invoked whenever anyone wanted to describe American pluralism. Will the present path lead us down the road to deeper and more bitter racial divisions, ugly struggles over diminishing racial spoils, increasing civil conflict and eventually a South African future? Or perhaps just further into the realm of the ridiculous and the just plain stupid? I have no idea. But you can check one of the above.
August 3, 1997, http://archive.frontpagemag.com/Printable.aspx?ArtId=24395; http://www.salon.com/1997/07/18/horowitz970718/.
I first heard the name Geronimo Pratt in the early 1970s during a late night conversation with Huey Newton, the “Minister of Defense” of the Black Panther Party, now deceased. Pratt was the leader of the Los Angeles branch of the Party and had been convicted of a robbery-murder that occurred on December 18, 1968. A young elementary school teacher named Caroline Olsen and her husband, Kenneth, were accosted by two gunmen on a Santa Monica tennis court, and were ordered to lie down and give up their cash and jewelry, which they did. But as the predators left the scene, one of the gunmen emptied his .45 caliber weapon into their prone bodies, wounding Kenneth Olsen and killing Caroline. Nearly two years later, Geronimo Pratt was charged with the murder and subsequently convicted despite the efforts of a young attorney on the make named Johnnie Cochran.
It was not just the murder conviction that made Pratt a figure of interest, since other Panthers had gone to jail for criminal offenses as well. Pratt was special because Newton and the Party had hung him out to dry. Even though he was “Deputy Minister of Defense,” and ran the Los Angeles Party, there were no “Free Geronimo” rallies organized on his behalf, as there had been for Huey and other Panthers like Ericka Huggins and Bobby Seale. In fact, Huey and the other Panther leaders—Seale, David Hilliard and Elaine Brown—flatly denied Pratt’s alibi that he was at a Panther meeting in Oakland at the time of the murder. It was this denial that sealed Pratt’s fate.
There were reasons why Huey would do this. He had expelled Pratt from the Panthers shortly after the murder of Caroline Olsen because of his support for an anti-Newton Black Panther faction led by Eldridge Cleaver. This more violent wing of the Party had accused Newton of selling out the “armed struggle.” To show their authenticity, Cleaver’s followers had formed the “Black Liberation Army,” which had already launched a “guerilla war” in America’s