Racist ad is not free speech issue

Anderson is a member of the National Council for African
American Men.

By Joseph Anderson

On college campuses across the country such as UC Berkeley,
Brown University, Princeton, Duke, University of Wisconsin and UC
Davis, there has been a firestorm of controversy over an
anti-African American university newspaper attack ad titled,
“Ten Reasons Why Reparations for Slavery is a Bad Idea
““ and Racist Too” (http://frontpagemag.com/horowitzsnotepad/2001/rep_ad.htm).

The ad was sent to 34 different college newspapers. It was
considered by many people of color as incendiary and manifestly
racist. Indeed it could have been written by the Aryan Nation.

While the Daily Bruin and most other college newspapers did not
print the ad, the reaction of students at other universities
suggests that students, including those at UCLA, have not been
exposed to enough information about the kind of attitudes the ad
expresses and why those attitudes are indeed racist.

The author of the ad, David Horowitz, is a ’60s-era,
former left-wing advocate. But Horowitz jumped ship with the shift
in the prevailing political winds toward conservative Reaganism,
son of Reaganism (Bush), and even covertly neo-conservative,
“New Democrat,” Clintonism.

  Illustration by CASEY CROWE/Daily Bruin Horowitz
apparently decided that there was more money, a better life, and
especially much more media attention, something he craves, to be
gained on the conservative side.

Unfortunately, there was always a handful of either loosely
wrapped or intellectually thin leftists in the ’60s (e.g.,
Clarence Thomas), who ultimately felt that the sails blowing to the
right were financially fuller ““ and decided to go with
that.

In the meantime, Horowitz raises to a fine political art the
same “self-victimology” that he generally attacks
African Americans for perpetrating. Here, Horowitz cloaks himself
as the ultimate “free speech martyr.”

Horowitz runs his attack operations out of Los Angeles. His
headquarters is home to the harmless-sounding Center for the Study
of Popular Culture. But Horowitz’s activities and his recent
book, “Hating Whitey,” are anything but harmless. His
book attacks African American civil rights activists as being
anti-white racists.

At UC Berkeley, on his latest anti-African American,
racial-vendetta crusade, David Horowitz abruptly turned tail and
bolted after his campus speech on March 15. This after only the
third questioner challenged him. People of color have rightly
condemned his “reparations” ad and ranting speech as
racist.

But many whites, including UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert
Berdahl, have tried to twist the ad issue into a free speech issue.
So it is obvious that, even in the year 2001, many whites,
including the chancellor, still don’t recognize blatant
racism, suitably couched. This is a despicable state of affairs in
a so-called institution of “Higher Learning,” to borrow
from the title of Ice Cube’s rap song on racism in
college.

But, David Horowitz was not out to promote free speech. David
Horowitz was out to promote himself ““ as usual.

In a format perverting the U.S. Constitution’s Bill of
Rights, Horowitz claimed that reparations to African Americans have
already been paid in the form of welfare. With a racist mind-set at
the foundation of all his arguments, Horowitz stereotypes most
African Americans as living on welfare. Apart from that being
false, welfare is provided to people because they are poor, not
because of their race.

In a sick twist, Horowitz then claims that not only does America
not owe African Americans reparations, but that, in fact, it is
African Americans who owe America a greater debt for ending
slavery. He further says that blacks today have actually benefited
from the national wealth that slavery helped to create.

So Horowitz believes that the nation that immorally accepted
brutal slavery gave African Americans a gift by eventually
outlawing the practice and replacing it with “Jim Crow”
apartheid practices. By the same perverted logic, a
kidnap-beating-rape victim would owe a debt to her rapist if he
finally let her go free.

In another twisted claim, Horowitz said that there were
thousands of blacks who also owned slaves. Actually, it was free
blacks who, in many cases, purchased their own family members to
protect them in slave-owning states.

In his ad, Horowitz also claimed that most Americans have no
connection to slavery. This is patently false: slavery has spawned
a legacy of racial oppression that exists to this day. As a result
of slavery, whites today have inherited preferential advantage.

Southern post-Civil War laws like the “Black Codes”
made it illegal for African Americans to work for themselves. From
Tulsa, Okla., to Rosewood, Fla., African Americans were later told
to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps, and when they did,
successful African American business towns were often destroyed by
rioting whites or, even later, by “urban renewal.”

For an enlightening discourse on the reparations issue, Randal
Robinson, head of TransAfrica, the organization that spearheaded
the American divestment movement against then-apartheid South
Africa, has written the book “The Debt: What America Owes to
Blacks.”

Horowitz’s ad not only invokes racist stereotypes, it also
relies on raising straw man arguments to justify his claims. Over
and over, he asserts the usual specious argument that not all
whites benefited from slavery. That is false anyway ““ whites
benefited as a nation.

But his argument is legally irrelevant. Many Americans
don’t directly benefit from all national policies. But the
arguments for reparations aren’t made on the basis of whether
every white person directly gained from slavery (just as the debts
of a corporation don’t depend on who it comprises). The
arguments are made on the basis that the United States itself
institutionalized slavery and protected it by law.

As the government is an entity that survives generations, its
debts and obligations survive the lifespan of any particular
individual. As a citizen of the United States, one not only enjoys
the rights and privileges of citizenship, but also shares the debts
and liabilities of the nation.

Present-day Americans cannot evade national debts by claiming
they were incurred by, and only benefited, a prior generation.
Thus, the moral debt arising from 350 years of free, forced, brutal
labor and practically free “Jim Crow” bitter labor
““ barely ending in the 1960s ““ is an obligation the
United States cannot ignore.

Nor can the United States evade a moral debt merely because the
direct victims have died. The descendants of slavery have inherited
a right to some meaningful form of restitution, because they still
greatly inherit its legacy.

No government would make the descendants of each beneficiary pay
the descendants of each victim for even an inhumane national policy
whose detriment still exists. Thus, governments make restitution to
victims as a group or class. This is a debt that was once promised
but soon abandoned by the United States.

Finally, Horowitz was forced to admit that the First Amendment
does not require any newspaper to accept a paid ad. But newspapers
should have moral standards below which they would reject any ad,
especially an incendiary publicity stunt. The First Amendment does,
however, allow a newspaper to express regret, upon reflection, for
printing a self-promoting, morally obscene ad. The fact that the
Daily Californian, Chancellor Berdahl and many white students on
campus didn’t recognize just how racist the ad was is
shocking.

It is hoped that students at UCLA, regardless of color,
don’t become victims of Horowitz’s racist manipulations
and his self-serving media gambit, as did many white students at
Berkeley and other universities. Students should always critically
analyze specious claims in any such ad, especially against people
who are popularly stereotyped. We should all always realize that
voices of oppression will never retire.