Hating Whitey and Other Progressive Causes by David Horowitz Read Free Book Online

following the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965 that ended legal segregation in the South. It was an attempt to explain — and to justify — the paradox of "rebellions" against a body politic that had just achieved equality before the law for all Americans. (That these riots might just be criminal eruptions apparently was not a political option.) The commission's reaction to the 1960s riots served to define the "second civil rights era," the distinguishing feature of which has been the squandering of the moral legacy of the first and the restructuring of the civil rights agenda as a radical cause. Its legacy has been the system of racial preferences called "affirmative action."
    While intellectually more respectable than Farrakhan's crackpot religious claims, the theory of institutional racism inspires no less sweeping indictments of whites. Developed into a full-blown ideology by the "multicultural" academy, institutional race theory regards any statistical disparity of black representation anywhere in the culture as proof of white malevolence and of the necessity of racial preference remedies. The unspoken assumption of every such policy is that institutions where whites predominate must be forced to be fair to black applicants, even where there is no actual evidence of unfairness. But does even the most fanatical advocate of affirmative action quotas believe that Harvard, Yale, and other institutions of the liberal elite contrive to bar qualified African-American students from entry, and would continue to do so in the absence of these affirmative action laws? Then why are such laws necessary? Because, their proponents argue, the influence of "institutional racism" is so subtle that Harvard and Yale would nonetheless exclude qualified African-Americans without the coercive intervention of the state.
    It is precisely because the theory of institutional racism and the affirmative action policies it has spawned are a radical rejection of the American system — of individual rights, equal opportunity, and equality before the law — that the most dramatic anomaly of the second civil rights era has been produced. Whereas the civil rights movement under Martin Luther King's leadership achieved its aims with the support of 90 percent majorities in both houses of Congress, a majority of Americans — roughly 70 percent — oppose the current civil rights agenda that embraces racial preferences. This opposition reflects the inability of most Americans to understand or respect the persistence of "black rage" in the face of the enormous social, cultural, and economic gains made by African-Americans, as well as their own sense that they accept African-Americans as fellow citizens and full partners in America's civic contract. This self-understanding is corroborated by every major opinion survey on race relations taken in recent years.
    It is this reality that has spawned the peculiar angst of bell hooks. "Why," writes hooks, "is it so difficult for many white folks to understand that racism is oppressive not because white folks have prejudicial feelings about blacks (they could have such feelings and leave us alone) but because it is a system that promotes domination and subjugation?" In other words, for radical ideologues like hooks, actual racism is not the issue. The issue is a marxist fantasy of domination and subjugation. In conceding that individual racists are not the problem, hooks is neither original nor alone. She is simply a camp follower of the political left. In an issue of the New Yorker devoted to race relations, Angela Davis laments the passing of the 1960s when "there was a great deal of discussion about . . . the importance of understanding the structural components of racism. There was an understanding that we couldn't assume that racism was just about prejudice — which, unfortunately, is what not only conservatives but liberals are arguing today."
    For the radicals, racism is not about prejudice but about