Friday, Sep 5, 2008
Of course, I am something of a political provocateur. Long ago, I resolved that I was going to draw on my experience in the left and fight fire with fire. I was determined to speak to and about the left in its own morally uncompromising voice. I had a rationale for this, particularly where race matters were concerned. Most people are intimidated by the race card when played by the left. Few will take the risk of candor. In these circumstances, a surreal situation has gradually developed until we find ourselves talking now to charlatans and racists as though they were civil rights leaders worthy of respect. Is there any non-black person in America (not ideologically distraught) who thinks of Al Sharpton -- a racial incendiary and convicted liar -- as a possible heir to Martin Luther King Jr.? Or who does not realize that the very presence of Sharpton does irreparable damage to the civil rights cause?
Yet who outside myself and a "provocative" few would dare to say as much in public? When Sharpton held his Martin Luther King charade at the Lincoln Memorial last August, flanked by New Black Panthers calling for race war, what news media or public figure stepped forward to puncture his balloon? The head of the ACLU took her place on the platform side by side with the racists without even noticing the incongruity. The head of the Urban League was there as well. And so was Andrew Cuomo, then-secretary of health, education and welfare, now a Democratic candidate for governor of New York. And why not? The entire Democratic Party leadership has embraced Sharpton as a "civil rights leader." Is there any mystery why the African-American community feels OK doing so as well?
That is the situation we find ourselves in, and until it changes, I will continue to speak (as the left likes to say) "truth to power." I will do it, even though it means being tagged as a provocateur.
I will especially continue to do it on the issue of reparations, which is the biggest shakedown scam of all. Most blacks in America started their post-slavery lives with nothing, and come now from a legacy of centuries of oppression and violence against them. But notwithstanding this past, they have achieved enormous gains in this country. Collectively, they have accumulated more wealth than 90 percent of the world's nations. In their majority, they are solidly middle-class -- and this by American standards, which means they are wealthy by most international standards. Yet on the cusp of success, we do not celebrate their success. Instead we have a black leadership revving up a gigantic grievance machinery to once again dramatize failure -- the failure of America in the past; and the failure of a minority of African-Americans, who are mainly fatherless and poor, to take advantage of the opportunities before them. This failure is presented improbably as a continuing "oppression" by the rest of America and thus a rationale for the "reparations" claim. The reparations, however, are not to be paid by slave-owners, or even scions of slave-owners, but by working class Hispanics, Asian boat people, Kosovo refugees, blue-collar whites whose ancestors may have died fighting to defeat the slave power itself, and a hundred million or so others whose ancestors weren't even Americans in 1865. What kind of lunacy is this? A Time magazine poll shows that 75 percent of Americans oppose reparations for slavery. Don't you get the idea that black leaders behind the reparations movement want it to fail so that they can keep rage alive and stoke the fires of grievance that have rewarded them so generously in the past?
In asking this question, am I really "inflating black leadership flaws" as Joan maintains? Or telling it like it is?
Finally, I plead guilty to enjoying the attention the ad is getting and the consternation of those editors at campus dailies who have tried to stifle free speech. Who wouldn't be? Is it important to have two sides to a debate? Is it a national disgrace that without my intervention this dialogue on reparations would never have taken place?
I did not pick Black History Month to launch my campaign. But if I had, what of it? Is Black History Month about history or about the imposition of a party line? Are there two historians who agree on anything? In fact, I wrote my Salon article last summer as a response to the decision by the Chicago City Council to support reparations. The vote was 47-1. That's some vote for a democracy. Were opponents of reparations intimidated into silence? You bet. Is this an appropriate occasion for outrage? I thought so.
Six months later, I cut the Salon article to single page size -- suitable for an ad -- when I noticed an Internet posting about a reparations conference that was to be held at the University of Chicago at the beginning of February. I guess it was for Black History Month. It was clear from the announcement that all the participants would be in favor of reparations. Was this stacking of the argument appropriate for a university setting? I didn't think so. I sent the ad to the Chicago Maroon so those students at the university would get another point of view. The Maroon printed the ad without apology and without incident.
I decided to send 10 ads. I knew that faculty and students on most American campuses functioned under a cloud of intimidation from the left and suspected that no faculty member would publicly present an anti-reparations view. From a career perspective it would be too dangerous. I make no apologies for attempting to run these ads as a way of stimulating a campus debate that couldn't otherwise take place. Believe it or not, I never dreamed the ad would be turned down at places like Columbia and Harvard, or that the editor of the Daily Cal at Berkeley would apologize for printing it after the fact. His apology (and that of the editor of the Aggie at UC-Davis) was tantamount to saying: We will never air a point of view that offends the campus left, particularly the African-American left. It was this gauntlet that convinced me to send the ad to as many college papers as my resources permitted.
I am thrilled by the result. And why wouldn't I be? The attempt by the left to turn these campuses into indoctrination centers has been thwarted. A debate has been started all across America on the issues of reparations and free speech. Campus censors are on the run. It is time to say goodbye to campus fascism, no matter what color it comes in. Too many conservative speakers have been driven off American campuses in recent decades; too many newspapers offensive to leftists have been burned in order to deny others access to their ideas. This kind of behavior should be unacceptable anywhere, but especially in a campus setting. Where are the adults? Where was the University of Wisconsin president when his security guards were telling editors of the Wisconsin Badger-Herald (which printed my ad) to lock themselves in their dorm rooms for their own safety? Why weren't the leaders of the so-called Mulicultural Coalition who organized the thuggery expelled? Why weren't the students at UC-Berkeley who burned the pamphlets of a visiting speaker last semester suspended and expelled? Why are the university administrators silent during a controversy that goes to the heart of the university mission?
I can tell you this. In the days to come, I am not going to be hiding in anybody's closet. I'm going to be out there fighting this battle -- which I did not begin yesterday, or just to exorcise my personal demons during Black History Month. Ten years ago, Peter Collier and I launched Heterodoxy as a magazine to fight political correctness on college campuses. The center I head was in the forefront of the battle against speech codes. Our lawyers actually forced a University of Minnesota president and a U.C. chancellor to undergo sensitivity training in the First Amendment when they attempted to confiscate a conservative magazine and ban a fraternity whose T-shirt the left found objectionable. The experience was so embarrassing that both universities dropped their speech codes shortly thereafter. But speech codes are only one instrument the left has devised to quash free expression at institutions of higher learning. So when this latest battle is over, I will be finding new occasions to continue the fight, call me what you will, until American campuses are made safe for learning, which means safe for expressing different points of view.
Get Salon in your mailbox!