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

white people did it.
    When blacks commit crimes, the truly guilty party is the white devil who made them do it. Even when hooks does not fully identify with an odious act committed by an African-American, she still finds a way to mitigate it. She disavows Farrakhan and his antiSemitic screeds, but nonetheless asks: "From whom do young black folks get the notion that Jews control Hollywood? This stereotype trickles down from mainstream white culture. . . . Indeed, if we were to investigate why masses of black youth all over the United States know who Louis Farrakhan is, or Leonard Jeffries, we would probably find that white-dominated mass media have been the educational source."
    In other words, if blacks are anti-Semitic, it is the white devil who taught them to be so. Of course, hooks's reasoning is so circular, she could just as well praise the "white-dominated media" for imposing the leftist view on the public that America is institutionally racist, since the media have generally embraced this canard. A representative front page "news article" in the Los Angeles Times , for example, purported to show that the traditional ladder of upward mobility for America's minorities no longer exists for blacks and Hispanics, thanks to institutional racism:
WHITES EARN MORE AT ALL LEVELS, CHALLENGING BELIEF THAT EDUCATION IS THE KEY TO PARITY DATA SHOWS
    Whether they have dropped out of high school or invested years in a graduate degree, whether they have struggled to master English or not, California's minorities earn substantially less than Anglos — a disparity that challenges the long-held tenet that education is a key to equality . . .
    This Times report was probably more powerful in persuading middle-class blacks who read it that the system is stacked against them than all the speeches of Louis Farrakhan. But the Times study, which was conducted from census figures by the Times's own analysts, showed nothing of the kind. The term "Anglo," its euphemism for "whites," included minorities — Jews, Armenians, Arabs — who are victims of ongoing prejudice and hate crimes and yet (for reasons unexplained in the study) are successful and thus provide the Times's yardsticks of "privilege." The category "Hispanic" — though ideologically useful — is sociologically spurious, since it includes South American Indians, Portuguese-speaking Brazilians, low-earning Puerto Ricans and high-earning Cubans.
    The Times's analysts made no allowance for the kind of educational degrees, graduate or otherwise, that its target groups possessed. It is well known that more blacks and Hispanics seek college degrees in low-paying fields like education rather than in higherpaying professions like physics or engineering. The Times's analysts also failed to take into account age or on-the-job experience, obviously critical to earning potential. Yet the editors of the Times chose to print essentially meaningless but racially inflammatory statistics and to weave them into an analysis that corroborated the existence of "institutional racism." The article appeared on January Io, 1993. After reading it, I called the reporters responsible. They sheepishly admitted that they did not have the data to make the claims they had, but defended the decision to print the story anyway.
    The theory of institutional racism, devised by radical academics and promoted by an irresponsible media, has also led to a religious expression of racial rage called "black liberation theology." Its chief text, written by the Reverend James Cone, was published by the Maryknoll press, an imprint of liberation theologians, who in the 1980s found Christ among the Sandinista dictators and El Salvador's communist guerrillas: "This country was founded for whites and everything that has happened in it has emerged from the white perspective. . . . What we need is the destruction of whiteness, which is the source of human misery in the world."
    This kind of Afro-Nazism would seem hard to swallow