Original Article: http://dartreview.com/archives/2001/06/11/reparations_rumble.php
Monday, June 11, 2001
George Orwell once said that real journalism consists of what someone does not want published, and that all the rest is public relations. Public relations is what campus journalism mainly consists of today.
A very interesting and important thing has happened on a number of university campuses. So far, only Brown has come out of it with honor.
David Horowitz is an interesting fellow. He was raised in Queens, NYC, both his parents devote American Communists. He marched in the May Day parade, went to communist summer camps, lived in a communist world. During the 1960s, he found himself in California with the New Left.
As such, his eyes were opened by the Black Panthers, located in Oakland. While white liberals (see Garry Wills' 'The Second Civil War') were idealizing the Panthers as freedom fighters, Horowitz saw them up close as gangsters running protection rackets, prostitution, wholesale dope distribution, and using murder as a business tool. A young woman who knew too much about the Panthers ended up floating in San Francisco Bay with her head crushed.
Horowitz abandoned the New Left and began a new project aimed at exposing liberal fatuity. He has published a good autobiography Radical Son and many other books.
Which brings us to recent illuminating events on campus.
Horowitz has drawn up an ad listing ten reasons to oppose giving American blacks 'reparations' for slavery. The sparkplug for this reparations campaign seems to be Randall Robinson, head of 'Trans-Africa,' a lobbying organization for sub-Saharan nations. But many other black spokesmen have spoken favorably of reparations. It's a wacky idea, and an ABC poll indicates that 80 percent of Americans oppose it.
Horowitz has been trying to run his ad in undergraduate newspapers, and is willing to pay for space.
Now, I have reviewed Horowitz's ten points, and I find them cogent. There is nothing insulting or offensive about them, as far as I can see. We will come to specifics later. But first, the reaction on the campuses.
When the ad ran in the Berkeley student paper, protesters howled outside the Daily Cal's offices and destroyed what copies they could get their hands on. The editors then apologized for letting the paper 'become an inadvertent vehicle for bigotry.'
To repeat: I have held the ad up to the light, and found a strong and cogent argument, but no 'bigotry.'
Editors at UC-Davis and Arizona State groveled and apologized similarly. As of last week the ad had run in eight of 34 student newspapers to which Horowitz had submitted it, and been rejected by the rest, including papers at Harvard, Columbia, and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
Evidently, fear of an adverse reaction from blacks amounted to preemptive intimidation. Blacks did not even have to counter Horowitz's arguments. They merely had to glower to produce editorial weak knees.
No doubt editors felt that their universities would not back them up and come out for vigorous argument. Such fear is probably justified. But it certainly illustrates Orwell's point about real journalism and mere public relations.
As I said above, Brown University behaved admirably. The Brown Daily Herald made it to the newsstands a day late and protected by campus police.
When the paper began to be distributed on the previous day, a coalition of protesting minority students, mostly black, stole the paper's entire press run, obviously to prevent the ad from being read.
The editor-in-chief of the newspaper Patrick Moos objected: 'It's not our place to decide which political views can be published in the paper. We want to publish everyone's views.'
The Brown administration backed up the editor. Interim president Sheila Blumstein said the theft of the newspapers would be investigated. And continued, 'The most effective response to ideas — even to those that may be deeply offensive — is not to silence them or intimidate those who espouse or publish them, but rather to develop effective opposing arguments through wider civil discourse.'
Sheila Blumstein's statement is decent enough. A university is a place for discussion and argument, not strong-arm tactics. She conceded too much, however, when she referred to views 'that may be deeply offensive.' That by no means describes Horowitz's ad. And, anyway, whether a statement is offensive or not should count for nothing in a university setting. What counts is whether it is true or not.
Space here does not permit me to quote the ten arguments in full. But I will try to condense them as accurately as I can. Judge for yourself about whether they should be suppressed.
1. There is no single group clearly responsible for the crime of slavery. Black Africans and Arabs were responsible for enslaving the ancestors of African Americans. There were 3000 black slave-owners in the antebellum United States. Are reparations to be paid to their descendents too?
2. There is no one group that benefited exclusively from its (slavery's) fruits. The claim for reparations is based on the false assumption that only whites benefited from slavery. If slave labor created wealth for Americans, then obviously it has created wealth for black Americans as well, including the descendents of slaves.
3. Only a tiny minority of white Americans ever owned slaves, and others gave their lives to free them.
4. America today is a multi-ethnic nation and most Americans have no connection, direct or indirect, to slavery.
5. The historical precedents used to justify the reparations claim do not apply, and the claim itself is based on race and not injury. The 'historical precedents' referred to here are survivors of the Holocaust, Japanese-Americans—WW II internees—and African-American victims of Tuskegee or racial outrages in Rosewood and Oklahoma City. This would be the only case of reparations to people who were not immediately affected and whose sole qualification to receive reparations would be racial.
6. The reparations argument is based on the unfounded claim that all African-American descendants of slaves suffer from the economic consequences of slavery and discrimination. No evidence-based attempt has been made to prove that living individuals have been adversely affected by a slave system that ended over 150 years ago.
7. The reparations claim is one more attempt to turn African-Americans into victims. It sends a damaging message to the African-American community.
8. Reparations to African-Americans have already been paid. Since the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the advent of the Great Society in 1965, trillions of dollars in transfer payments have been made to African-Americans in the form of welfare benefits and racial preferences (in job contracts, job placements, educational admissions... If all this is not enough to achieve a 'healing,' what will?)
9. What about the debts blacks owe America? Slavery existed for thousands of years before the Atlantic slave trade was born, and in all societies. But in the thousands of years of its existence, there was never an anti-slavery movement until white Christians—English and American—created one.
10. The reparations claim is a separatist idea that sets African-Americans against the nation that gave them freedom. (N.B.—I take this to mean that blacks in tribal Africa were anything but free.)
So, there it is, the ten arguments in an ad that caused mostly black minority protest to seize and destroy campus newspapers, caused cowardly student editors to apologize and grovel after printing the ad. Only at Brown University, so far as I know, did the university administration stand up for free discussion and against intimidation ad the destruction of property.
I don't even see the ad as 'offensive,' as some say. But a university is not about offensiveness. Some have found Darwin 'offensive.' A university is about truth, and does not have an offensiveness meter.
What we do see here is the power of supposed black 'victims' to intimidate and steal (newspapers) and subvert the very idea of a university.
Most student newspapers have rejected the ad. Those that have run it have been vilified and had their press runs stolen.
You would think Horowitz's ad is something run by the Ku Klux Klan. It is not.
I find it both vigorous and cogent.