Friday, Jul 4, 2008
The Salon columnist charges that Joan Walsh, in her defense of his anti-reparations ad campaign, belittled him as a "racial provocateur" and publicity hound.
Mar 13, 2001 | My Salon editor, Joan Walsh, has generously offered me space for a "rebuttal" of her story and profile. Her story reports on the travails of an ad I have attempted to place in many college papers, questioning the wisdom of reparations for slavery 136 years after the fact. In "rebutting" her article, my task is complicated by two facts. First, though Salon's editors and I disagree politically, they have given me the very opportunity to have my views heard that so many college papers have recently denied; moreover, in her article Joan has provided a defense of my position in the current controversy. I thank her for this support. We are indeed colleagues and I cherish that fact. In the second place, the only truly negative aspect of Joan's piece is its somewhat tongue-in-cheek portrayal of me as a publicity-seeking "racial provocateur." By merely taking the opportunity (and space) to reply as offered, however, I may seem to be confirming the charge.
Let me begin by saying that I am not a racial provocateur and, as I hope will become evident in the course of this reply, I do not have a chip on my shoulder that causes me to seek confrontation with the African-American community. In fact, I do not see myself in confrontation with the African-American community at all. My fight is with the African-American left.
When a well-meaning Democrat in Florida designs a butterfly ballot to help elderly Democrats vote their ticket but inadvertently confuses them instead, and when this becomes a pretext for Jesse Jackson and other demagogues to charge Republicans with a plot to "disenfranchise the descendants of slaves," that is racial provocation. If you're looking for a racial provocateur, Jesse Jackson should be your model. Jackson's strategy is a cynical triad: provocations, negotiations and then "reparations" (for Jackson, of course, and his family and their well-heeled friends).
Under the self-serving leadership of Jackson, Al Sharpton and Randall Robinson, the civil rights movement has adopted the triad as its political formula of choice. The reparations claim itself is the work of racial provocateurs -- people who want to put race at the center of every political conflict and reveal it as the source of every problem afflicting African-Americans in order to shake out the loot on the back end. The entire thrust of the ad I attempted to place -- "10 Reasons Why Reparations Is a Bad Idea and Racist Too" -- was to dissuade African-Americans from following the dead-end path of racial provocation down which left-wing arsonists are leading them.
In writing about me, Joan has anchored even her misperceptions in anecdotal data: "'Now we're sending the ad to about 100 papers,' an excited Horowitz says by cellphone, rushing from meeting to meeting." Well, not "meeting to meeting" exactly. When this conversation took place, I was in my car on Wilshire Boulevard, driving home. The accurate half of Joan's account is that I was indeed coming from a meeting, as I mentioned to her. It was, as it happens, a five-hour meeting, the only item on my calendar that day. Because it was around 3 p.m., she had to leave our cell conversation abruptly to pick up her daughter after school. As a result, Joan never got around to asking me what my meeting had been about. If she had, it would have thrown some light on her perceptions.
My meeting, in fact, was with three African-Americans who run a grass-roots organization in the inner city. Their operation is an outgrowth of the 1992 Los Angeles riots and is an effort to bring jobs, technical training, "economic literacy" and other financial resources to its inhabitants.
At this moment, thanks to the dead-end, race-polarizing, left-wing leadership of Jackson and others, the project was facing the kind of crisis that similar organizations are facing in inner cities all over the country. It had been receiving, for example, $1 million a year from the Clinton White House; it had been getting valuable political support from Vice President Gore (which it returned to him during his presidential campaign). Now, along with the 92 percent of the African-American community that voted for Gore and stigmatized Republicans as racists, it had discovered what the two-party system is actually about, and why it might not be such a good idea to put all one's eggs into a single political basket.
My three visitors and I have our political differences. Our meeting began, inevitably, with a discussion of the reparations issue. Fortunately, however, the leader of the organization -- whom I have known and worked with for years -- was able to form a strong bond with me that none of my "provocations" has affected. He saw early, as others apparently have not, that my criticisms of African-American leaders come from a genuine concern for African-Americans themselves. My reparations argument is really a plea to African-Americans not to let their leaders separate them from the rest of America and then polarize their community against America, which by and large actually wishes African-Americans well.
As a result of our bond, and having aired our differences over the reparations issue, we were able to set to work on plotting a strategy with which to approach the Republican Congress and the Republican White House, through connections that I was able to supply. Our agenda was to get the new administration to continue and extend the support for this project that is now jeopardized, and to build additional bridges across the political divide. I have been working with this group and with similar organizations for many years, just as I have been working with the Republican Party to open its doors and extend its hands to communities and cultures in America that have been left behind.
So much for perceptions of me as an emotionally embittered antagonist of blacks.
Get Salon in your mailbox!