by Sara Russo

The Daily Californian, the University of California-Berkeley's daily student paper, apologized for printing an ad arguing against racially-based reparations for slavery on February 28th, calling it an example of "bigotry." The editor-in-chief responded to the angry mob that overwhelmed the offices of the Daily Cal by acceding to student demands that equal space be given free of charge for "student leaders" to respond to the ad, and by permitting protestors to seize remaining editions of the paper.

The ad was funded by prominent conservative author David Horowitz as part of a campaign to add a second voice to what he perceives as a one-sided discourse about reparations on college campuses.

"We realize that the ad allowed the Daily Cal to become an inadvertent vehicle for bigotry," read a formal apology appearing in the paper the following day. "A rebuttal to the ad from various student leaders will appear in Monday's edition."

The issuing of the apology was preceded by an angry confrontation between Daily Cal editors and protestors in the newsroom of the paper on the afternoon of February 28th, the day the ad was run. Following that dispute, protestors removed all remaining issues of the Daily Cal from campus distribution racks.

"Yes that did happen," Daily Cal editor-in-chief Daniel Hernandez told Campus Report, confirming the charge that numerous issues of the Daily Californian were seized. "I did not oppose that to happen. It was late in the afternoon. There were very many angry, angry people in this building. There were very many angry student staff members in this office and I allowed any staff member to exercise their right to take Daily Cals on a moral objection."

Titled "Ten Reasons Why Reparations for Blacks Is A Bad Idea-and Racist Too," the ad counters several commonly made arguments for reparations with ten points meant to elucidate debate on the issue. The subsections address such topics as "Only a minority of white Americans owned slaves, while others gave their lives to free them" and "There is no single group that benefited exclusively from slavery."

The ad also features more controversial statements. "Slavery existed for thousands of years before the Atlantic slave trade was born, and in all societies, but in the thousand years of its existence, there never was an anti-slavery movement until white Christians-Englishmen and Americans-created one," the ad states. Another section argues that reparations have already been paid to blacks "in the form of welfare benefits and racial preferences."

Hernandez also issued a personal apology for the ad. "Yesterday's edition of The Daily Californian managed to anger more readers than anything the newspaper has printed in years," he wrote. "Printed with terrible irony on the last day of Black History Month, the ad essentially said that the black community should not complain about slavery." Hernandez claimed that that ad was printed only because it "essentially slipped through the cracks" through "an admitted and terribly consequential series of missteps and miscommunications."

Hernandez also argued that free speech was irrelevant in this case. "Some may subscribe to the First Amendment in defending yesterday's ad, but, in my view at least, freedom of speech is compromised when it is bought," he wrote. "Buying space to preach a viewpoint is unfair in that it does not allow an opposing view to directly answer. This is why opinion pages exist."

"We routinely reject ads based on a variety of parameters-if there are inaccuracies in the ad," Hernandez explained to Campus Report. "Students here are telling us that there are inaccuracies in this ad. That it's factually incorrect. We're getting word from professors that it is factually incorrect in which case would be another reason why we would not have run it."

When asked for specifics about what parts of the ad were factually untrue, Hernandez responded, "I would think that the question of blacks being responsible for slavery is one of the things that I just don't think was appropriate."

"I'm dumbfounded. There's no basis for that," Horowitz responded to Hernandez's charges. "I don't know what's deficient in these students' educations, whether it's reading ability or familiarity with the First Amendment and what it means."

In a letter to the Daily Cal, Horowitz disparaged Hernandez's description of his ad, and alleged that his statement that the ad "essentially said that the black community should not complain about slavery" is "an absolute falsehood." "Nothing in my ad would give any reasonable person the impression that I think that slavery was not a great evil," Horowitz wrote.

Horowitz also criticized Hernandez's view that freedom of speech is irrelevant to a newspaper's decision to run controversial ads. "You may disagree with these views but you have no right to censor them. Indeed, you have a positive responsibility not to censor them," the author wrote. Student responses to the ad demonstrated extreme anger as well as extraordinary historical inaccuracy. One student who wrote to Horowitz claimed that the slavery practiced in Africa was kinder and gentler than American slavery. "Slaves were allowed to intermarry with the families and eventually purchase their freedom. Slaves belonged to the community and not to individual owners," the student wrote.

Another student wrote to ask, "Besides what kind of culture do white people have besides oppressing other people including themselves through their caste system? Every other ethnic group in this world has a culture but what do you have, a history of imperialism and white supremacy!"

Ironically, despite the Daily Californian's front-page apology for running the ad, Berkeley students charged the paper with housing institutional racism, and demanded even more drastic forms of contrition.

One student group devoted to repealing the UC system's prohibition against racial preferences in admissions posted fliers around campus demanding that the entire front page of the Daily Californian be devoted to an apology, despite the fact that a front-page apology had already been issued. "The refusal of the Daily Cal to run a full front-page apology for the racist ad placed by David Horowitz is a mode of silent support," the flier read.

Even Hernandez, despite denying that racism had any factor in the decision to run the ad, posited that Berkeley is not as left-wing as its popular reputation might indicate. "[Berkeley] has that sort of stigma or that sort of mystique which I think in many ways is untrue," the editor-in-chief told Campus Report. "I would argue that there is a silent-not majority-well maybe majority of students on this campus that wouldn't necessarily disagree with the ad that we ran. And I guess that's the troubling part of it too."

The trashing of copies of The Daily Californian that resulted from the anti-reparations ad is merely the latest in a series of newspaper thefts at the Bay-area campus. Other methods of censorship have occurred with increasing frequency in recent years as well. Last semester, a mob of students prevented former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu from speaking in the city. Earlier that semester, AIA Executive Director Dan Flynn was shouted-down and a book-burning was held of a monograph he had authored.

The ad was also run in student papers at UC-Davis, where it generated protests that resulted in an apology from the editor and at the University of Chicago where it was met with little comment. Horowitz has submitted the ad to a total of twenty-eight additional papers, ten of which have already rejected it. The advertising department of the Harvard Crimson accepted the ad, and it had been scheduled to run on February 27th until the editorial department vetoed it.

Parker Conrad, the managing editor of the Harvard Crimson, questioned the accuracy of various statements made in the ad, and rejected others as being outside the grounds of fair debate. Responding to the ad's claim that reparations had already been paid to blacks in "in the form of welfare benefits and racial preferences," Conrad stated, "Even if this is true…this is a little unfair, and I think we have no obligation to give everyone a forum to air their grievances in The Crimson." He continued, "We get editorials and letters from people with the strangest theories all the time. I think we have an obligation to make sure that everything we print in our newspaper, even if it is opinionated, is also fair. And this is not."

Horowitz was not surprised by the refusal of other campus papers to run his ad, especially in light of the controversy already in play at Berkeley. "Their assumption is that they represent and speak for all black people," he told Campus Report. "And anybody that disagrees with them has interests which are opposed to black people, which is a lie."