Daniel J. Flynn

    White racism has been relegated to the margins in America. The government, once the guarantor of oppression against blacks, now employs double the percent of African-Americans than are in the general population, aggressively prosecutes “hate-crimes,” and mandates racial preferences in its agencies and for those with whom it awards contracts. In the societal realm, bigoted remarks are not only unfashionable, but unacceptable as well. Even comments that are more demonstrative of poor manners and bad judgement than of hatred of other races are now grounds for mandated psychological treatment. Just ask John Rocker.
    Black racism, on the other hand, is often in the open and rewarded—particularly on campus. Angela Davis, Louis Farrakhan, and Sister Souljah are among those who have expressed extreme bigotry and anti-white hatred and yet are given thousands of dollars by colleges and universities to lecture on their grounds. Separatist institutions like all-black residence halls, student unions, and graduations that would be deemed “racist” if undertaken by whites are deemed “progressive” when members of minority groups engage in such segregation. 
    David Horowitz begins Hating Whitey by telling the story of his visit to Memphis, Tennessee, the very city where Martin Luther King was slain. As he visited what was once the Lorraine Motel, site of King’s assassination, Horowitz came upon the National Civil Rights Museum. Within the museum he saw a massive picture of King, and, peculiarly, two similarly sized photos of Malcolm X and Elijah Muhammad. Why Malcolm X, an anti-white bigot, occupied a place of honor equal to that of King, was confusing to Horowitz. Given Malcolm X’s purported abandonment of his earlier views at the 11th hour of his life, this was perhaps explainable, he reasoned. How Elijah Muhammad, “a racist and religious cultist,” occupied a place of honor in any “civil rights” museum was another story entirely. “It is as though someone had placed a portrait of the leader of the Hale-Bopp Comet cult in the Jefferson Memorial,” Horowitz points out to readers.
    The author wonders how the noble cause of the Civil Rights Movement degenerated from Martin Luther King to Louis Farrakhan,  “ the content of our character” to quotas, and school integration  to attempts to force schools to lift suspensions of juvenile delinquents who spark riots at football games.
    The news media, prime time television, Hollywood, and the schools all paint a picture of “hate crimes” being a one way street of white on black attacks. Law enforcement agencies, perhaps taking their cue from such societal shaping institutions, rarely target anyone but white males for prosecution in such crimes. Yet crimes committed by whites against blacks are far more unusual than crimes committed by blacks against whites. “According to Justice Department figures,” the author notes, “85 percent of the crimes of interracial violence are committed by blacks against whites.” While some of this disparity can be explained away by the larger population of whites in society, it does not account for the fact that a black is 50 times less likely to be the victim of a violent crime by a white perpetrator than the reverse. The most despicable hate crime, rape, the author maintains, is committed by exponentially larger numbers by blacks against whites than vice-versa, as well. “In a recent year,” Horowitz points out, “there were twenty thousand rapes of white women by black men, but one hundred rapes of black women by white men.”
    Fifty years ago, hotbeds of discrimination in education included the University of Virginia and the University of Mississippi. Such schools as the University of Massachusetts and the University of Michigan had no such official discrimination. Today, the later schools discriminate and the former do not. Yet it is the schools which award merit rather than race that are now labeled “racist.” “Ole Miss has resisted the new racial duplicity in admissions standards,” Hating Whitey informs readers. “The result is that 49 percent of whites who enter Ole Miss as freshmen graduate, and so do 48 percent of blacks.” Prior to the University of California’s end to racial preferences, only one of their eight flagship campuses graduated more than 50% of blacks within six years of their arrival as freshmen. All of these campuses graduated whites within that time period at rates that exceeded 75%. Not only do preferences and quotas discriminate against whites and Asians, but they ensure failure among blacks. A system that injects someone into an atmosphere in which their peers have superior qualifications—e.g., placing a high school track star in the Olympics—is destined to harm those it seeks to help.
    “Just as traditional marxists deride ‘bourgois’ democracy as a political sham to preserve the power of a ruling class,” Horowitz notes, “so the civil rights left dismisses equality of opportunity as a sham to preserve the superior position of a dominant race.”
    A disturbing chapter on bell hooks (she demands lower case letters for her initials), a mediocre writer that is widely read on university campuses, serves as a reminder that “hate speech” that is often condemned in whites, is applauded when members of minority groups are doing the talking. Horowitz discussed the title essay of bell hooks’ A Killing Rage. In the piece, hooks outlines her desire to kill a white man sitting next to her in the first class section of an airplane. The man’s only offense seems to have been purchasing the seat next to hooks, which hooks wanted for a friend who sought to upgrade from coach. Ironically, hooks then describes in detail berating the man and the airline for their “racism.” “I felt a ‘killing rage,’” she is quoted as saying. “I wanted to stab him softly, to shoot him with the gun I wished I had in my purse. And as I watched his pain, I would say to him tenderly ‘racism hurts.’”
    The cornerstone of Horowitz’s book is his chapter on the murder of a woman who he had recommend for an accounting job with the Black Panthers. Glorified in movies such as Panther, the Black Panthers was nothing more than a street gang that masked their criminal activities with Leftist rhetoric, according to Horowitz. Horowitz, who worked closely with the group for several years in the ‘70s, outlines the drug dealing, torture, rape, and murder in which the Panthers engaged in the name of “black power.” It was only when he suspected Panthers of murdering his friend did he begin to have second thoughts about his politics.
    Like white racists and hate groups such as David Duke and the KKK, the black racists Horowitz describes constitute only a small—albeit still respected—portion of the African-American community. The common denominator among hate groups of either hue is the willingness to accentuate black failure. Multiculturalists rely on this tactic to blame whites for black problems. White racists highlight them to denigrate African-Americans. A perspective not usually discussed by either of these groups is black achievement—in civil rights, economics, education, etc.   
    David Horowitz’s Hating Whitey stands in sharp contrast to the plethora of literature that parrots academic mantras about whites being the sole source of racism. Those that crave the predictability of the politically correct will be disappointed with this honest discussion of racism.
    “Are African Americans oppressed?” Horowitz asks.  “If so, what would explain the desire of so many black Haitians to come to American shores? Why were so many Haitians ready, a few years before their immigration was blocked, to risk life and limb to make the illegal passage across shark infested waters? Was it their desire to be oppressed? Were they longing to be dominated by a master race?”
    Although the progressive cause of “hating whitey” bemoans the legacy of slavery and racial tensions as if these problems were unique to the United States, it ignores something that is truly special about America. Blacks are less persecuted and more prosperous in America than in any place in the world—including Africa.